It’s the same, only different.
That’s the argument, as we understand it, being made by a British research team.
Sunil Sahaunak, a professor of infectious diseases at London’s Imperial College, and Steve Brocchini, a researcher at the London School of Pharmacy, think they have come up with a new way to create important, life-saving prescription drugs for less money.
They plan to take the molecules from existing patented drugs, change their structure, and claim they are new—something no longer covered by the existing patents.
Under this way of thinking, the drug is sufficiently similar to assume it will have the same therapeutic benefits as the existing patented drug, but sufficiently different to say that it isn’t the same thing.
Oh, and in case you think these professors are anti-intellectual property rogues trying to make a statement, forget it. Sahaunak’s Imperial College will hold the patent on their first new drug. A news story in London’s The Guardian says the school will hold the patent to “prevent anybody attempting to block its development.”
Or, as economists call it: protecting their self-interests. A number of universities are doing their best to garner patents from their professors because they make royalties off those patents.
Unaddressed are the critical questions: Will a patent office see the new molecule as “novel” and be willing to grant a patent? And if it is, then is there any reason to believe that the pharmacokinetics—how the drug acts in the body—will be the same?
An Indian pharmaceutical company plans to hold clinical trials to test the drug—presumably less-extensive trials than required in developed countries.
The professors call it “ethical pharmaceuticals.”
What it sounds like to us is that the professors are trying to find a new way to be a generic company, rob an existing pharmaceutical company of its IP, and profit from it—albeit at lower levels than a brand name manufacturer. And do it all under the banner of “we’re just trying to help the poor.”
Of course, let a few patients be harmed by those drugs after they hit the market—if they ever do—and our guess is the trial lawyers will have a field day with the professors’ attempt to create altered drugs and skimp on the clinical trails.
And then they and Imperial College may discover at least one reason why drug prices can be expensive.