Medical Breakthrough Could Change Global Politics

But the breakthrough is not merely biochemical. Shaunak's team is proposing a new model for the pharmaceutical business. The patent of the transformed drug they have developed is held by non-profit Imperial University. And because their methods are hundreds of millions dollars cheaper than the mammoth development costs of the big pharmaceutical companies - whose spending on marketing and advertising often dwarfs their funding of scientific research - Shaunak and his colleagues can market their vital medicines for infectious diseases at near-giveaway levels, yet still stay in business. How so? By forgoing the profit motive as the ultimate value of their work. "People in academic medicine have a choice," Shaunak told an Imperial College journal. "They can use their ideas and creativity to make large sums of money for small numbers of people, or they can look outwards to the global community and make affordable treatments for common diseases." The first drug developed by the team is a new version of interferon, the main treatment for Hepatitis C, a debilitating disease that afflicts 200 million people worldwide. Yet only 30 million can afford the medicine. That leaves the rest to face the chronic liver disease and premature death that the illness inflicts. The cost of Hepatitis C treatment in the UK is approximately $13,000 per patient per year, New Scientist reports. Nor can a cheaper version of the existing interferon be made, because Big Pharma players Hoffman-La Roche and Schering Plough hold patents not only on the drug but also on the standard way of adding the special molecules needed to enhance its performance. So Shaunak and Brocchini invented a new way attaching the molecules - from the inside, not the outside - that went around the patent restrictions and produced a medicine that "appears to be as effective as the existing product," according to Nature, the leading scientific journal. Their novel methods could also be adapted to extend the effectiveness of "drugs for other conditions such as HIV," at a fraction of current costs, Shaunak told New Scientist. Big Pharma says it costs an average of $800 million to create a new drug; but without the need to produce ever-expanding profits for shareholders or use glitzy ad campaigns to push their pills - or lay out the vast political patronage that Big Pharma dispenses each year to keep its favored politicians sweet - Shaunak says his team can now develop essential medicines for only a few million dollars each. http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/011607HA.shtml

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