Patents Passion and the Public Health

When it comes to healthcare everyone, it seems, wants to talk about patents.

Congress wants to reform them.

The WHO wants to circumvent them.

Some, such as Bernie Sanders (the Senator from Ben & Jerry's) want to eliminate them.

All concerned address the issue with passion and an interest in improving global public health.

But, even with the best intentions, they're missing the point. We need to focus beyond reforming patent law. We need to rethink the existing system to encourage pharmaceutical innovation (both incremental and discontinuous) in order to realize the potential of the Biomedical Century.

And not just in the US -- but globally.

The solution isn't exclsively patent reform -- that's too narrow. We need to consider new strategies that enhance and protect intellectual property rights. What we need to seriously study -- and transnationally -- is the issue of data exclusivity.

There are some numbers that are too important to ignore. Today it takes about 10,000 new molocules to produce 1 FDA-approved medicine. And if that's not frightening enough, only 3 out of 10 new medicines earn back their research and development costs. And here's the kicker -- unlike other R&D-intensive industries, pharmaceutical investments generally must be sustained for over two decades before the few that make it can generate any profit.

Current patent life just doesn't cut it. Not in the US. Not in the EU. And certainly not via TRIPS.

If we don't think seriously about moving away from patent reform and towards more robust protection of data exclusivity we are going to seriously jeopardize the potential for new medicines -- at a time when science makes potential breakthroughs tantalizingly close.

Do we really want promising compounds abandoned because of awkwardly crafted and inconsistent (read "unpredictable") patent terms?