this is India playing with fire. and it is not about securing access to important drugs to Indian patients - it is about boosting the native Indian generic pharma industry. while India itself does not provide any significant output in R&D spending in pharma.
so yeah, big pharma is evil and greedy, however no one else takes 1bn$ to try out a new product and have it fail in front of the FDA - which is the usual scenario, as most(!) new products get denied.
how many other industries out there need to PROVE that their products are not only safe but also have an actual benefit? as this is HN, let's see all those fancy task/email/collab/social apps prove their usefulness in scientific trials - and get denied if they fail to be better than notepad.
so yeah, awesome, let's kill pharma's business model without any alternative in sight.
how about having generic makers pay a fixed % of their revenue into a R&D fund? without it they are just leeching off.
Read about evergreening first. The issue is not that India is denying some novel invention - but a slightly modified version of an already expired patent.
see, and this is why nerd-news is so frustrating. one article, plus one cool term 'evergreening'. super, let's hit wikipedia and whoa i can spout internal sounding knowledge.
problem being that here we have a larger pattern in india's behavior which is not neatly laid out in a few linked articles. so no way to quickly read up on it, you need to be in the industry or closely following it.
so yeah, evergreening, awesome. same with roche, bayer?
and in novartis case:
you know that the original molecule was never patented in india? india only started recognizing patents issued after the early 90s.
you know that novartis already gave away 95% of this particular product for free in india? right?
this new item is a trainwreck, just like the pycon thing. problem that far fewer people here will recognize that.
Oh, well, if your problem is that people are on India's side without the due knowledge to make an informed opinion, how's this: I have a degree with honours in Biochemistry, and I worked for Novartis for eight years in clinical safety.Glivec was one of the drugs we handled all the reports for. I have no axe to grind with Novartis, it's a good place to work and it'll be a long time before I'm as well-off as a programmer as I was when I was working for them.
I'm of the opinion that India got it absolutely right.
Thanks - you enlightened me. Typical aloof nerd behavior - just assuming that other people do not understand the complexity and you do. I am from India and have been following the Indian patent industry since early 2000s including when they switched over from process-patenting to product-patenting (http://www.lorandoslaw.com/Publications/Changes-in-Indias-Pa...). And that 95% free distribution is Novartis' assertion and they heavily regulate the distribution of the drug - you never know how many people who actually needed the drug got it. And guess what, the Indian Supreme Court (and India is a democracy) disagreed with Novartis in terms of how novel their invention was (thus effectively mooting your point).
But, of course, being the ever-cool nerd you are - you know everything and have already proclaimed others are ignorant/flagrant personalities.
so yeah, big pharma is evil and greedy, however no one else takes 1bn$ to try out a new product and have it fail in front of the FDA - which is the usual scenario, as most(!) new products get denied.
how many other industries out there need to PROVE that their products are not only safe but also have an actual benefit? as this is HN, let's see all those fancy task/email/collab/social apps prove their usefulness in scientific trials - and get denied if they fail to be better than notepad.
so yeah, awesome, let's kill pharma's business model without any alternative in sight.
how about having generic makers pay a fixed % of their revenue into a R&D fund? without it they are just leeching off.