Partnerships between drug manufacturers and the federal government are helping the industry move quickly to develop COVID-19 therapeutics and vaccines. That’s a good thing.
But some policymakers want the government to seize patents for drugs that benefit in part from publicly funded research—arguing that consumers pay twice for these drugs, so the government should control pricing and license the drugs to generic manufacturers, explains The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board.
“This would kill the innovation that is saving the lives of COVID patients,” the editorial explains.
One example is Gilead’s remdesivir, an antiviral that has helped lower the coronavirus death rate. While NIH helped fund research on remdesivir’s efficacy, Gilead discovered and developed the drug—and expects to spend more than $1 billion on R&D and manufacturing this year alone.
But Americans don’t actually pay “twice” for drugs as some industry critics claim,finds new research by Rena M. Conti of Boston University and Frank S. David of Pharmagellan LLC and Harvard-MIT Center for Regulatory Science.
They found “the public sector’s contribution to new drugs has been in the form of early scientific findings, unrelated to current or potential applications,” with 90% of NIH-funded publications connected to new medicines “related to the underlying drug target, not the actual therapy itself.”
Furthermore, “the private sector is the main inventor,” with 25% of drugs approved between 2008-2017 having “any documented contribution, of any magnitude, to a drug’s initial discovery, synthesis, or key intellectual property by a public sector research institution or academic ‘spin-off’ company.”
The conclusion: “Proposals to control a therapy’s price based on the degree to which public funds contributed to its development are not just unfeasible to implement, but also a distraction from more far-reaching efforts to improve the affordability of all medicines. Attention should instead be focused on developing practical solutions that ensure that clinically valuable new drugs continue to be developed and are accessible by all patients in need.”
We agree.
More Health Care News:
Reuters: U.S. to pay Pfizer, BioNTech $1.95 billion for COVID-19 vaccine
“Pfizer hopes to start its pivotal late-stage trial of the vaccine as early as next week, pending regulatory approvals.”
STAT News: NIH to start ‘flurry’ of large studies of potential COVID-19 treatments
They include “studies of antiviral monoclonal antibodies to treat COVID-19 in both hospitalized patients and patients who can be treated at home; studies of drugs to quell overreaction of the immune system that the agency has picked from dozens of approved treatments; and studies of blood thinners in very sick COVID-19 patients to prevent problems caused by blood clots.”
