Publicly Funded Drugs Should Be a Public Good

Progressive economist Dean Baker has made the case for years against drug patents (examples like this and this), arguing that publicly funding research and development would serve the public better in all ways that matter (except creating billionaires like the Sacklers).

Cory Doctorow recently wrote a post on the same topic.

Doctorow points out that drug companies spend three times as much money on marketing as they do on research, that much of their "research" goes into figuring out how to make new versions of old drugs to keep them under patent, and that they use profits to bribe generic drugmakers to keep generics off the market and kill competition.

But the main reason for his post isn't about any of those ills, bad as they are.

He wrote because of a fourth point: the risk of R&D doesn't even have to be borne by a company in order for it to reap the profits. Since a 1980 law was passed by Congress, the public can pay for the research, through federal grants to a university researcher, and then that researcher can take the drug's patents to a private company for private gain.

They're called "pharmaceutical transfers" and the one Doctorow focuses on in his post is a "patent for using T-cell receptors...to treat solid tumors from HPV" (human papiloma virus, the cause of cervical cancer). Some detective work follows, but it turns out a Rutgers University researcher who used to be at the NIH's National Cancer Institute is the one who developed the patented drug.

Not only his salary, but that of his collaborators, was paid for with tax dollars. Their facilities were as well, as were both phases of trials:

This wealth will come by charging us – the public – to access a drug that we paid to produce. The public took all the risks to develop this drug, and [the researcher] stands to become a billionaire by reaping the rewards – rewards that will come by extracting fortunes from terrified people who don't want to die from tumors that are eating them alive.

The transfer of this patent is indefensible. The government isn't even waiting until the Phase II trials are complete to hand over our commonly owned science.

When I first started reading Dean Baker's thoughts on this topic years ago, I confess I doubted him. At some point I changed my mind after listening to his reasoning, and now I wonder why I ever thought it made sense for drug companies to be in charge of deciding what to develop, based on the profit motive and the patent system.