I’m not a patent lawyer, but I do work with patents in the U.S., and generally, a novel use of an existing drug isn’t considered sufficiently inventive to get a patent. The legalese goes something like, “the structure of an administered compound and its function are inextricably and inescapably linked”. If you patent the method of administering a particular drug to a patient, you get that patent once, no matter what function the administration is intended to effect.
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That’s important, when you are going on the market, even the underground one. For closed dealings with just yourself and family, it does not matter so much as you are likely to stay under the radar and not get discovered and prosecuted. Remember law is only considered broken when you get caught; otherwise it is just you and your conscience and your OPSEC.
Also, you can sell the microreactors themselves instead of their products. Smaller market and lower profit margin but also should be quite safer. If you want to get even safer, sell the CNC machining tech for making of custom microreactors.
The microreactor tech is deceptively simple. I suggest taking a closer look. (Todo: write an article.)
Edit: I am watching this kind of tech even since before it was common in literature; my admittedly half-baked-in-comparison idea was about one or two orders of magnitude bigger (but still very small) systems, intended to be highly modular, with the modules designed to be possible to make in conventional MIT-style “fab lab”, in situ in any place in the world to produce drugs that are needed there (for AIDS, malaria, anything that just happens there) in a village scale. Too small to attract crackdown of the Intellectual Property Police, too numerous to matter if couple such cargo-container scale labs are found and taken down (here comes the make-the-parts-in-situ part).
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This is one of the scariest parts of the TPP for us in healthcare in NZ. Our drugs are bought nationally using a volume discount negotiated by Pharmac. It wouldn’t surprise me to find that we lose this and are opened up to being sued for off license use of drugs …
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I wonder if “Lyrica Nights”, the title of an article outlining the recreational abuse of pregabalin? ( http://emj.bmj.com/content/30/10/874.2.abstract) falls under a similar copyright infringement? I suppose it doesn’t hurt their bottom line to be selling a product with such a high risk of recreational abuse.
Agthorn missed the point. You’re right, with many many exceptions - as many as money can buy. Cf: DMCA.
Copyright infringement? Let’s be very clear on this point: Pfizer is claiming patent rights.
Patents can be expected to expire on a specific date…Copyright? One shouldn’t count on that happening anytime soon. Trademarks? They can fall at any time into genericity. The lawyers who claim that all of this falls under the domain of Intellectual Property may scheme to privatize ideas for the length of a copyright term, with the breadth of of a patent claim, with the disclosure requirements of a trade secret, but society would be significantly better off if we recognized patents, copyrights, trade secrets, trademarks, and all the rest as distinct types of compacts between society and the claimants, with different protections and different limitations for each type.
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Almost wish I was a doctor just so I could NOT prescribe this or anything else they make (if an alternative to their product was available, of course).
I’m so sick of corporations and how they have become so focused on shareholders/stock value, which do not add any value to a company, at the expense of things/people that actually increase the value of the company. An insightful and informative article on this phenomena was written and posted on the Alternet.org site by Lynn Stuart Parramore (How Huge Companies Like Apple Are Actually Parasites on America’s Tech Industry) and is a recommended read for everyone. It details how the shift from valuing employees and developing their skills in order to expand the companies knowledge base to the current “stock value above all else” mentality and executive bonuses tied directly to that as well as their stock options has led to “rigging” the value of the stock with moves that actually damage the companies skill set and knowledge base of their proprietary technologies (laying off experienced workers that earn more than new hires or temp workers, less quality control due to inexperience plus cost cutting leading to cheaply made components, etc) in order to give the appearance of profits/higher value in the short term. Of course, that illusion is created by damaging their ability to innovate and threaten their ability to survive.
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Without giving away too much personal info, I was privy for a while to the whole “patent extension” side of Pfizer’s business. To make a long story short, when a key patent is about to expire, pharmcos will do ANYTHING to get a “new indication” patent extension.
Pfizer in the past few years in particular has had some spectacular Stage III and Stage IV clinical trial failures for drugs that were supposed to fill the gap left by Lipitor. Note that in the drug development process, funding a drug to Phase III usually means you get approval for at least some use. Now, Pifzer also has been royally spanked for pressuring off-label uses for Neurontin on doctors, with some medically disastrous results.
This latest bit of slimy behavior does not surprise me one whit.
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Wow, a patent on pain… that’s some next level Evil Overlord shit right there.
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But what about the millions who suffer from Restless Leg Syndrome? Have you no charity for their plight?
I’m not sure if it’s hype, but the prohibitionists have circulated stories about designer drugs causing really nasty side effects like these
The best example are those synthetic marijuana substitutes they sell at head shops “spice” and the like. They are marketed as safe herbal alternatives to weed, but have caused severe and permanent injury to users. They stay one step ahead of the DEA and drug regulators by changing their synthetic molecule just enough to get around drug scheduling regulations. By the time the new compound is outlawed the manufacturers have moved on…
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That’s the problem with the laws. Instead of using a relatively safe, proven-good molecule, you are forced to generate analogs with unexpected side effects. To add insult to injury, you cannot even really track these effects, and gain knowledge and possibly a serendipitous discovery of something interesting or even important, because of the legal issues involved.
We need some non-chemical ways of altering brain functions in our toolbox. Electronics (e.g. ultrasound arrays for brain stimulation, or transcranial magnetic fields) is much more difficult to sniff by dogs than chemical substances, doesn’t have to be smuggled as it can be made locally (and even when smuggled, it is easier to conceal as just-some-electronics, the customs drones are dumb), and its use cannot be detected by piss tests.
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