

"If US had a patent law like India, they would discover many more drugs" - denzil_correa
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/stoi/all-that-matters/If-US-had-a-patent-law-like-ours-they-would-discover-many-more-drugs-Anand-Grover/articleshow/45322866.cms

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dalke
I don't see any evidence that India's pharmacetical industry is finding more
drug than the US one. According to
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15115225](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15115225)
, "most new drugs [in the Indian pharmaceutical] are not major therapeutic
advances", so I don't see that the patent law makes much of a difference.

This link says "FDA's own data says 76% of drug patents in the US are for new
forms of existing drugs. I pointed out to them that they were giving the same
number of years under patent for an original new molecule as for new forms of
an existing molecule. Companies make the same amount of money by tweaking
existing molecules. So what's their incentive to discover new molecules?"

I wonder if this is in reference to the FDA study from 1989 to 2000, which is
mentioned in [http://pcij.org/blog/wp-
docs/Changing_Patterns_of_Pharmaceut...](http://pcij.org/blog/wp-
docs/Changing_Patterns_of_Pharmaceutical_Innovation.pdf):

> From 1989 to 2000, the FDA gave a priority review to 24% of NDAs, which
> appeared to provide clinical improvement over the products available at the
> time of application. It assigned the remaining 76% to the standard review
> track, indicating that these drugs did not appear to provide significant
> clinical improvement over marketed products in one of the four recognized
> ways mentioned above.

It goes on to observe reasons for variations in the formulation "Although such
medicines do not make important clinical advances, they increase physicians’
prescribing choices, thus enabling them to match the drug to the needs of the
patient. In some cases, modified drugs enhance patients’ convenience.", and
generally agrees that there is inventive to meet Wall St. demands for growth
by developing more variations.

Still, it doesn't seem that Indian patent law leads to more drug discovery, in
the sense of drugs that are new drug entities.

