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By Richard Gold - 5th March 2010
The biomedical industry has been enormously successful in bringing us new drugs to fight a staggering variety of ailments.
But it now faces a crisis in finding the new medicines that will save us in the future. Fewer and fewer of these medicines are being developed, while research costs are skyrocketing. At the same time, too many people in poor countries continue to die because we conduct too little research on their health problems and charge prices that they cannot afford for existing drugs.
The present situation is neither healthy nor sustainable. Only a radical change in the way that industry and the research community undertake research and share knowledge will get us out of this predicament.
Public and private sectors must use their patent rights in a way that prioritises sharing over hoarding, by patenting the right things rather than everything, and licensing out appropriately and forming partnerships. Unless they do so, not only will the world’s medicine cabinet empty out, but those working in biomedical industries may be out of a job.
The reasons for the current crisis are clear enough. First, biomedicine has uncovered those treatments that were most straightforward to find. The next generation of medicines will be far more challenging as they become more targeted and test the limits of our knowledge about the workings of the human body and disease. Second, as our tolerance for serious side-effects plummets, increasing regulatory hurdles, it becomes more difficult – and costly – to develop a new medicine.
Despite the changing research challenges, we continue to set up the same ‘knowledge fiefdoms’ through patents as we did 30 years ago, when one enterprise could realistically develop a new medicine itself. Today’s reality is very different.
The more we learn about disease and the body, the more complex we realise the problem of finding the next generation of medicines to be. Many individual laboratories distributed throughout the world are working on small pieces of a very large puzzle. No one party and no one company can hope to do this work by itself. Only by bringing different researchers together can we realistically hope to find the medicines of the 21st century.
Those who conduct or supervise research programmes within the pharmaceutical industry know this. At a conference in Washington, senior industry managers repeatedly called for increased knowledge-sharing, more partnerships and less fuss to be made over patents. Patents are important, but they should be used to build partnerships, not keep others out.
The information technology industry faced this same crisis earlier and hit upon the same solution: open the innovation process to collaborators to build partnerships. In doing so, industry and the public sector can share the risks and costs of new development, build tools that will shorten the time of bringing a new drug forward, and increase competition.
Patents can either stand in the way of further development and making drugs available, by being used to keep others out, or be part of the solution. Securing the right amount of patents, licensing them out appropriately, and entering into partnerships makes a stronger patent system than one in which individual actors get the maximum amount of patents, hoard them and go it alone.
Nothing in this is a challenge to the fundamentals of patent law; it is a challenge to how we use that law. Just as the same property laws apply to one’s house as to a shopping mall, the same patent rights apply to knowledge one hoards or one shares. The difference is that, in the case of a house, one uses one’s rights to keep others out; in a mall, one uses them to invite people in. If we are to succeed in finding new medicines, it is time to move our innovation system out of the house and into the mall.
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