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Free Medicine | | | Big Pharma has responded by considering and applying these transformations separately in the context of conventional drug development. The problem is that there is simply too much information for a drug to interface with -- the nature of the molecular structures and complex chemical reactions that are reprogrammed by the drug to change the function of cells and organs to affect the course of disease. Moreover, this information varies between individuals. The result is that the state-of-the-art includes drugs like statins, like Lipitor, which have at best an uncertain impact, despite their ubiquity and cost. Alternatively, there have been unequivocal failures like Vioxx -- which was designed to be more specific than its predecessor, but which through that specificity somehow causes more serious side effects. Overall, drug pipelines are running dry, as most projects fail despite the use of expensive new technologies in the development process. | |
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< | The future of medicine requires absorbing the revolution as a whole: rethinking the integration of information and health. One vision, favored by incumbent interests, is "personalized medicine." The idea is to match drug choice and dosage to an individual's DNA sequence and information from real-time measurement of biochemical processes. Personalized medicine will be based on the current legal regime of data exclusivity and patents on both drugs and sequence information. Pharmaceutical companies would retain exclusive rights over how to diagnose and treat patients based on their own DNA sequence and sensor data. To get there, drug patents or exclusive rights to market drugs will be extended, by allowing the extension of monopoly rights on both chemical isoforms and new applications of drugs, as well as patents on diagnostic methods. Within this context, open source drug discovery” can exist on the margins, where pharmaceutical companies share data and license molecules for humanitarian -- and unprofitable -- problems, like tuberculosis. | >
> | The future of medicine requires absorbing the revolution as a whole: rethinking the integration of information and health. One vision, favored by incumbent interests, is "personalized medicine." The idea is to match drug choice and dosage to an individual's DNA sequence and information from real-time measurement of biochemical processes. Personalized medicine will be based on the current legal regime of data exclusivity and patents on both drugs and sequence information. Pharmaceutical companies would retain exclusive rights over how to diagnose and treat patients based on their own DNA sequence and sensor data. To get there, drug patents or exclusive rights to market drugs will be extended, by allowing the extension of monopoly rights on both chemical isoforms and new applications of drugs, as well as patents on diagnostic methods based on restricting the use of otherwise freely available genetic information. In this context, open source drug discovery can exist on the margins of strictly "humanitarian" -- i.e. unprofitable -- projects, like tuberculosis. | | | The alternative is Free Medicine. This is exemplified by the emerging use of social networks for conducting genome-wide association studies at one end of a new pipeline, and clinical trials at the other end. These developments will facilitate distributed innovation in networks of the doctors and patients. Indeed, innovation once emerged from case studies rather than mass trials. In an era when we can measure individual variability, it makes sense to return to a more distributed and flexible form of medical development. | |
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< | The power of free medicine is that it works on health as a process, rather than just focusing on products, like drugs. So, it will lead not to just better health care, but to better health. The problem is that free medicine isn’t rooted to products that can be tied to exclusive rights, whether through patents or patent-like legal schemes. But, this is actually the power of free medicine, which is that it does not rely just on particular treatment products -- drugs -- but on a range of ways of treating patients, including natural products, changes to diet, and a world of research that has been neglected because it can’t be incentivized by the award of exclusive rights. | >
> | The power of free medicine is that it works on health as a process, rather than just focusing on products, like drugs. So, it will lead not to just better health care, but to better health. Unlike personalized medicine, free medicine won't just be about products that can be tied to exclusive rights, whether through patents or patent-like legal schemes. The IP regime puts such an emphasis on research that can lead to the award of exclusive rights, which neglects a wide range of ways of treating patients, including natural products, changes to diet, and modifying the built environment --a world that would open up with the renaissance of free medicine. | | | | |
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< | -- BahradSokhansanj - 12 Jan 2011 | >
> | -- BahradSokhansanj - 5 Mar 2012 | | | |
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