Those econmies of scale are simply driving up profits for an oligopoly that uses IP laws and acquisitions to extract maximum value from sick people.
We could revoke the
IP and thus force these companies to compete on price... but that hasn't happened. Thus the only solution that is making any progress is circumventing the IP and developing an open process.
It's unclear to me if the lack of competition is due to IP laws. For all I know, they've been coasting with the same production methods for 20+ years (the article mentions that insulin was relatively cheap in 2002). With such large profit margins there wouldn't be much incentive to improve anything.
I don't know the exact details and I could be wrong, but my understanding is:
There is IP around the production process (specifically the genetic strain of e-coli). Because the production process is biological, generics produced with a different process are not automatically approved by the FDA and have to undergo an expensive approval process. Thus the goal here is to devolop a process with open IP and get that process approved.
The problem is that patent system is a joke, and the description is likely broken (or incomplete) enough so that even a bunch of experts will have to experiment with the process to decrypt it.
You really need to buy out trade secrets of this particular brand.
