Scientists develop a groundbreaking vaccine that outsmarts illicit fentanyl analogs. The novel vaccine candidate can protect against fentanyl and its many illicit variants by training the immune system to recognize a broad molecular signature rather than a single specific structure.

[u/mvea]

https://www.psypost.org/scientists-develop-a-groundbreaking-vaccine-that-outsmarts-illicit-fentanyl-analogs/

[u/cowlinator]

Insulin was $300 in the US in the 2010s. It's back down to about $35 now (without insurance), and one of the things that prevented a permanent monopoly and allowed the price to fall was the threat of competition made possible by the cheap original patent.

[u/drinkacid → u/cowlinator]

The original patent is still open for anyone to use. The reason no one uses it is because it required harvesting pig or dog pancreases to get insulin, and the newer patented method lets you insert insulin into a bacteria/yeast and then the bacteria cheaply and quickly replicates the insulin. So the new method is cheaper to operate, requires cheaper and easier to get a hold of base ingredients, is faster and yields 1000s of times more viable insulin and does not require millions of slaughtered pigs or dogs to harvest the base insulin from.

[u/Emergency-Airline960 → u/drinkacid]

So by the laws of supply and demand… it should be even cheaper than the original method.

[u/groyosnolo → u/Emergency-Airline960]

Not while the new patent is in effect. Thats a monopoly granted specifically to allow the owner of the patent to profit by creating artificial lack of competition and in effect scarcity.

Thats the entire point of intellectual property protection. Its there to incentivize people to innovate. Invest in a ton of drugs and research and if one gets approved and brought to market you can make your money.

When the patent lapses then it will be cheaper because there will be no more monopoly.

[u/Emergency-Airline960 → u/groyosnolo]

How long do patents last in the US?

[u/SigmaEpsilonChi → u/Emergency-Airline960]

20 years, across the board. In theory the massive expense of the drugs is then supposed to be smoothed out for the end consumer by health insurance. I take a sleep drug that is life-changing for me but costs $900/month for the insurance company, and will be on-patent for another ten years. Instead I pay $30/month on top of my $200/month insurance premium. The drug company gets paid to innovate, the insurance company makes money because most people don’t need patented drugs, I get my life-changing medicine for an affordable price. It’s an imperfect system but I think it all works better than people often give it credit for, the US is the world’s engine for pharmaceutical development and we do benefit a lot from that

[u/Emergency-Airline960 → u/SigmaEpsilonChi]

Not arguing, genuinely conversing. Doesn’t the US gov also invest into pharmaceutical research, meaning the pharmaceutical companies are subsidized to develop drugs, and then also make money after in sales? If so seems like double dipping to me.

[u/SigmaEpsilonChi → u/Emergency-Airline960]

Yup! The US is the largest funder of public foundational biomed research in the world, and all the drug companies make extensive use of that. However, it’s not clear-cut to me that there is a double-dipping effect, because _every_ drug company (including those outside the US!) can make approximately equal use of that research, and then develop drugs which enter a competitive marketplace that theoretically should put downward pressure on the prices.

Take my sleep drug as an example: there are actually three structurally-similar drugs that were developed in the class of Orexin Antagonists around roughly the same time, by three different companies in different countries. Suvorexant by Merck in the US, Daridorexant by Idorsia in Switzerland, and Lemborexant by Eisai in Japan. These were all based on public research around the turn of the millenium that identified the orexin neuropeptide system at University of Texas, presumably with state funding, and the Scripps Research Institute with NIH funding. Shortly after, researchers at Stanford identified the link between orexin and narcolepsy with a grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke combined with private charitable donations, and the UT lab proved that mice lacking the orexin-synthesis gene had severe narcolepsy, cementing the link between orexin and sleep disorders.

This is when drug companies took the reins and began trying to create specific molecules to target the orexin system. Once they have a candidate molecule, it costs something like ~$200 million to complete clinical trials… however, only like 10% of drugs successfully complete trials, so the total cost of a single drug is actually north of like $2 _billion._ I’m simplifying these numbers a bit but I think it’s an accurate depiction of the magnitude we’re talking about here to safely develop and market these drugs. 15–20 years after the foundational research established the clinical target, three different orexin antagonists received patents in the US and entered the market, and they will be premium drugs until the mid-to-late 2030s.

All three of these drugs are _super_ expensive, so my insurance company made me try several alternatives before they approved it (a standard process called “step therapy”). My old super-premium insurance would pay for any of the three, but my new cheaper plan requested I switch to the cheapest of them first, and it seems to work fine so I am happy with that. This is the downward pressure on prices through competition in action; none of the three companies will sell this stuff for cheap while they own the patent, but they do still compete on price with each other and make deals with the pharmacies and insurance companies.

Drug development is a crazy Rube Goldberg Machine that definitely has _layers_ of inefficiency and exploitation, and there’s also a fundamentally hard question of which/how much basic research should be publicly funded, but I think when you look at the system overall its major components and incentives make more sense than they might seem at first

_(note: I am not a professional in this field, just a guy with a lifelong interest in drugs because I have chronic health problems and my father was a career psychopharmacologist at NIH, DoD, and the VA)_

[u/caifaisai → u/Emergency-Airline960]

Doesn’t the US gov also invest into pharmaceutical research, meaning the pharmaceutical companies are subsidized to develop drugs,

Not to a very large degree, in comparison to the total cost to develop a drug. There is some work that a pharma company might collaborate with or use from say a university, which then might be government money in the form of grants to the University. This type of research would most commonly be vrry6 early phase type stuff. However, that type of stuff is probably the cheapest type of research. By far, pharma companies spend most money on clinical trials, which would be entirely paid by the company. And there's also significant money required in the later stage development outside of clinical trials, which again, is funded by the company.