Cancer Research: New Hope for Pancreatic, Prostate Cancers
As many who are familiar with me may recall, my mother lost her battle with lung cancer approximately 19 months ago. Since that time, whenever I am trolling for news and items that I might be able to write about, I am continually drawn to news items discussing cancer research.
As anyone who is familiar with clinical trials know, there is no guarantee that even exciting therapies will ever make it to market, much less have a positive impact on patients. Still, the research has to start somewhere and science moves at a deliberate pace. As Thomas Edison even famously quipped, even a failure is successful at teaching what is now not possible.
Positive news stories about cancer research and development also provide hope. Cancer has taken far too many lives. With continued, concerted effort, eventually it will be eradicated. Whether that will be in our lifetime…who knows. It certainly won’t be if patent rights continue to erode. Without strong patent rights, there just isn’t going to be the incentive to pursue speculative therapies, drugs and treatments that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop and take to market…particularly when so many fail.
In any event, as I was looking for interesting things to write about, I stumbled across a pair of potentially interesting items…one dealing with pancreatic cancer and the other dealing with prostate cancer. For more information on FDA, pharma and biotech law, please also check these PLI resources:
Emotion And Anecdotes Should Not Drive Patent Policy Debate
Written by Gene Quinn (Founder of IPWatchdog.com and Practice Center Contributor)
Emotion and anecdotes unfortunately drive the debate on IP policy, particularly patent policy, because most people are suspicious and predisposed against monopolies. That is certainly understandable, at least in a vacuum. Who among us likes monopolies? Monopolies charge super competitive prices and consumers have no leverage, which leads frequently to inferior goods or services that consumers are forced to accept. This aversion to monopolies has been ingrained in American culture and heritage since the founding of the Nation, and was taken to new extremes during President Theodore Roosevelt’s Administration. Roosevelt stood up for the little guy and became known as a trust buster, what today we might refer to as a monopoly killer.
Unfortunately for those who seek to leverage the appropriate suspicion against monopolies, a patent is not a monopoly. A patent does confer exclusive rights, but as every inventor knows the fact that you have a patent does not guarantee that anyone will be interested in the good or service associated with the patent grant. Without interest there is no market, without a market there can be no monopoly. So patents are not equivalent to creating a monopoly.
Read the rest of the article at IPWathchdog.com.
06.17.10 | Guest Bloggers, Patent Issues, Patent Policy, posts | Stefanie Levine
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01.9.14 | Patent Issues, posts | Gene Quinn