Aligning pharmaceutical innovation with medical need
Carl Nathan of Cornell’s Weill Medical College has published an essay on the above topic in this month’s Nature Medicine. I can recommend the article for anyone interested in the conundrum of creating medicines to treat diseases orphaned by modern pharmaceutical economics. Nathan does a particularly nice job of summarizing extant policies, projects and proposals for tackling this tough problem; it’s a valuable reference.
On the critical side, I wasn’t bowled over by his proposal of relying on a combination of “open-access” drug discovery/development and a utility-based global patent and government reward system (neither idea is new nor an invention of Nathan’s, as he notes) to spur innovation for underserved medical conditions. I simply find the patent track in particular to be unworkable as described. That said, doing nothing clearly isn’t an option.
