A Doctor Trying to Stop Heart Attacks

Re:A Doctor Trying to Stop Heart Attacks by WalterBright on Wednesday September 28, 2016 @08:08PM (#12602356)

Doing the safe-and-effective testing the FDA requires is incredibly expensive. But the cocktail is formed from off the shelf cheap components. So why should a company pay half a billion for testing when anyone could then make the drug? (The article didn't say it was under patent, and the tone of it suggests it wouldn't be patentable.)

This is the flip side of the good intentions of FDA's mandate.

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Re:A Doctor Trying to Stop Heart Attacks by gozur88 on Wednesday September 28, 2016 @09:54PM (#12602805)

This is the key point. The cost of bringing a drug to market is mostly in the clinical trials. If the drug company can't patent the compound it's testing, it will never make back development costs.

This is the big problem with nutritional supplements and herbal medicine. You can't patent a plant, so there are all kinds of herbs people take that have never gone through double-blind testing. Some of them are probably efficacious.

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Re:A Doctor Trying to Stop Heart Attacks by hammock on Wednesday September 28, 2016 @10:55PM (#12603010)

>The cost of bringing a drug to market is mostly in the clinical trials.

I would not say mostly, although clinical trials are a large part of the cost. (Roughly speaking) For every drug that makes it through final approval, there are ten that failed in trials. However, for every drug that makes it into trials, there were ten that didn't - and the R&D for those unseen drugs is also a huge cost for pharma companies.

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