Things that make my brain hurt: take your medicine
Following in the footsteps of my post on idiotic news stories related to schools, we’ll follow up with an idiotic news story related to pharmaceutical companies.
Canadian researchers discovered that a molecule known as dichloroacetate (DCA), which has been used to treat children born with metabolism problems, is also tremendously effective at shrinking lung, breast, and brain tumors in both human and animal tissue. Better yet, it would be a fairly inexpensive, non-toxic treatment that would help in cases where the tumor is difficult to reach by other methods, such as in the brain.
Great news, right? Well, sort of. The catch is that there’s no patent on this drug, leading some to speculate that drug companies may not be interested since they won’t be able to profit on it. Not that plenty of people don’t already go to Canada for their prescription medication anyway, but come on, drug companies: put your patients ahead of your pocketbooks, if you don’t mind.
2 Comments so far
Leave a comment
Why is a patent necessary to profit on it? Do you mean that it’s not patentable?
By Jordan on 01.18.07 5:47 pm
A good question. I did a little more research, and you’re right: it’s not patentable. The reasoning seems to be that it can’t be patented because it’s not a new compound (as it’s been around for decades, used to treat those metabolic conditions). One article I read suggests that it’s available from chemical suppliers for “pennies per dose,” but running the clinical trials to bring it to market would cost millions, which is out of the range for the Canadian federal agency that subsidized the preliminary investigations. Private sector funding would be required, but since it can’t be effectively monetized (due to the lack of patents), drug companies are unlikely to fork over the dough.
By Dan on 01.18.07 6:00 pm
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>