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posted by
martyb
on Tuesday August 23 2016, @07:34AM
from the staying-alive-is-getting-more-expensive dept.
from the staying-alive-is-getting-more-expensive dept.
EpiPen's price has ballooned about 400% since 2008, rising from about a $100 list price to $500 today. The EpiPen is one of the most important life-saving medical innovations for people with severe food allergies—which affect as many as 15 million Americans and 1 in 13 children in the United States. But its price has exploded over the last decade despite few upgrades to the product itself. The product's lack of competitors is likely a significant driver of the costs. [...] [The] EpiPen enjoys a near-monopoly on the market with annual sales of more than $1.3 billion and nearly 90% U.S. market share.
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EpiPen's Price Increased 400% since 2008
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* m2 stares at the monitor... it looks like a hamburger...
m2 - that's a bad sign
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @04:27PM
Have you ever actually met an engineer before?
Have you met a pre-clinical biologist, toxicologist, medicinal chemist, analytical chemist, clinical trial director, lawyer, and doctor all rolled-up into someone rich enough to actually be able to "tinker" with drug development?
Medical science costs a lot of money and, currently, the public does not want to pay for academics or the government to do all the steps. There are also many laws that are in place to protect patients, lab animals, neighbors, and the environment from the products and waste from the drug development process.
(Score: 4, Informative) by CirclesInSand on Tuesday August 23 2016, @06:34PM
Again, the position that researchers will never work together to develop new products unless the government gives them market monopoly. It's absolutely bizarre that anyone takes this seriously.
There's a ton of voluntary public funding for research, and for all the costs you mentioned, they are nothing compared to the cost of having your research be illegal because of patent infringement.
Furthermore, development in medicine isn't (usually) made in enormous leaps, it is made in small steps. Small steps depend on previous small steps being available to improve upon. Patent infringement prevents this. We can only imagine how many medicines haven't been developed at all because researchers weren't allowed to work on illegalized-by-patents life saving research.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @08:31PM
estimates of drug development costs are around US$1.3 billion to US$1.7 billion.
Researchers would love to work together, but it is a question of resources. I would be happy if the US government or a non-profit would dump that kind of money into developing drugs without patents.
I'm also not convinced that fear of patent infringement is what is holding any of this back. If you mean incremental changes on small molecule drugs, then that already happens in pre-clinical development otherwise the abysmally low clinical trial success rate would be even lower. If you mean patents are interfering with academic research, then you are way off.
http://m.ctj.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/02/06/1740774515625964.full [sagepub.com]