Ellen ‘T Hoen gave a TED talk about a man
who discovered he had aids and so did his 3 year old son. Since the man was
rather poor from Kenya, he could not afford the AIDS treatment to live a nice
healthy life like those in the United States because it cost 12,000 per year
USD. However, there are certain countries that do not respect US patents like India
who were willing to use their patent and create the same exact concoction for
much cheaper. Thus, the price of these AIDS drugs plummeted to 300 per year in
just two years and now cost about 60 dollars per year to continue this level of
wellbeing. This was made possible through the patent pool which allows people
in third world countries to use the patents for their own and create drugs necessary
to sustain life. Hoen never talked about how much money was spent in research
and development of these drugs which could make it tough for firms to value the
research if it can be copied by someone else the very next day.
Hi Kyle,
ReplyDeleteI like how you mentioned that Hoen never actually went into the monetary aspects of R&D work conducted by companies and valuing that research if it can be simply copied. I feel like that is one of the reasons the voluntary aspect of the pool makes it less likely for truly remarkable drugs made by these companies to be submitted into the pool. These organizations at the end of the day seek profits and if their profits are to be significantly cut, especially for a ground-breaking drug, they won't necessarily be incentivized to voluntarily give up those exclusive patent rights. I think you bring up a good discussion point behind whether this pooling can actually work in terms of the monetary aspect at the end of the day.
As Rushil mentioned and you wrote, money is an extremely important aspect. I think Ellen should have spoken about money, maybe discuss a breakeven point, even why Gilead decided to submit the patent.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of improving your post, I think you should extend your analysis so that it balances out your summary.