The Patent Trap

Affordable Healthcare vs Pharmaceutical Profits - I've never been able to satisfactorily find a reasonable answer to this question. As a Bengali brought up among persuasive socialists I'm pulled one way, as a person working in an MNC pharma company, I'm pulled to the other.

Given the burden of healthcare costs, where even people in developed countries shudder about the cost of medicines, it is easy to blame pharmaceutical companies with obscenely high profit margins - a rough calculation of the cost of some medicines gives an estimate of more than 2000% profit margin. Even with Medicare, people in developed countries dread the rising healthcare costs of old age. In poor countries, if you fall ill, you die without adequate healthcare, your family starves to provide you with whatever healthcare they can afford. A friend of mine, a doctor, who's responsible for a line of Sanofi Aventis' oncology medicines, was once privately telling a colleague of his that he couldn't wish him better sales - because that mean that families of more cancer patients would be going bankrupt...

On the other hand, I've seen the sheer cost of pharmaceutical research. I've seen the sheer number of candidate molecules being screened, and so many promising molecules falling by the wayside. it costs a king's ransom to get a new drug out, and a lifetime of dedicated research usually results in a total of zero. A Gertrude Elion is a rarity - hundreds of equally brilliant scientists have gone to their maker empty handed.

It takes a huge incentive for an organisation to invest trillions of dollars to fund drug discovery - in the absence of a potential to earn multi-billion dollar profit, no business would risk blowing up funds the equal of many nations' GDPs to find the elusive treatment for cancer, TB, HIV etc. All that half a century of government funded research in India has resulted in is a handful of drugs, none of them successful. And all the price-controlled pharma companies in India have managed is to develop cheap copies of western research.

And because there is inadequate profit from diseases of the develping countries, few companies invest in them.

Is there a solution? Many pharmaceutical companies are involved in private-public partnership to provide drugs to the needy. For the companies, it is the most that is sustainable in the long run, but it is still not enough - treatment is still too expensive for most.

Is there a solution? I don't know. The sharpest minds in the world are working on it, but I fear that there may be no easy answer. And cheap populism from politicians will only complicate the road to an equitable solution.