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Dear list! Last week (13 days ago) Graham Seaman wrote:
On Mon, 3 Jun 2002, Timm Murray wrote:On Monday 03 June 2002 12:23, Graham Seaman wrote:We need to find a chemist. ;-) Since a) a bottle of aspirins costs me less than it does to download mozilla, and b) people manage to create labs to produce ecstacy, amphetamines, LSD etc in their kitchens with almost no capital, I suspect in general, very little - the interesting thing would be, are there SOME medicines which are genuinely expensive to make, or none at all?Perhaps a catlyst hasn't yet been discovered, so it takes years for the proper reactions to take place. Perhaps a reaction will only take place under very strict conditions (like absolute darkness at 130 kelvins, no more and no less). Perhaps it needs a chemical which is very hard to come by. Any one of these could make a medicine very expensive.Are either of the first two common in creating medicines? And in the 3rd case, are there actually 'rare chemicals'? Meaning I suppose firstly are there medicinal chemicals based on rare elements, and secondly, do synthesis costs always come down once you have volume? (I have no idea at all about the answers to any of that...)
On the German list we have Barbara who is rather knowledgeable in this field. I asked her to prepare some information which she did. Her full mail with some more (German) links is available at http://www.oekonux.de/liste/archive/msg04958.html I translated some key paragraphs below. Mit Freien Grüßen Stefan --- 8< --- 8< --- 8< --- 8< --- 8< --- 8< --- 8< --- 8< --- 8< --- 8< --- Hello Stefan, I don't know how quickly you need an answer to the simple question for the production costs of a medicine - what I learned meanwhile is just that there seems to be no more difficult question ;) . ... ... It is clear that the demand for transparency in prices is high on a national basis as well as on a international basis and its over and over - unsuccessfully - demanded. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Short result of the cornerstones of a price calculation: Expenses: - Input substances + plant + costs for personal etc. - Research & development - Licenses and fees such as concession including studies (regulatory overhead) - Marketing - Distribution => For producer delivery price = these costs + Shareholder value :) + Which share does the medical system of the respective country carry? => Who does really pay? Distribution of public resources / private resources / regulatory policy of the respective medical system of the country ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The "Verband forschender Arzneimittelhersteller (VfA)" [federation of the researching medicine producers] amounts the expenses for research & development to 14-16.5% of the whole turnover, investment to about 5.5% from which 20% flow to research & development - but a matter of fact seems to be, that the expenses for marketing are regularly twice as high as the expenses for research (...). ... http://www.cptech.org/ip/health/ ====================== Obviously here is all the good, beautiful and true gathered together. This is the site of James Love who was on the Wizards of OS 2 and also otherwise is a name which you always stumble over. ... Without fail from there you get to http://www.genericsnow.org http://www.healthgap.org/ http://www.accessmed-msf.org/ ... http://www.cipla.com/ is the Indian producer of generic drugs, which offers the HIV triple therapy for 350$ per patient per year - in the USA is costs according to Cipla 10-15000$. ... The trick of the success of Cipla probably is, that in India patents are valid only on ways of production but not on substances as such (until 2003 the law should be aligned to the WTO standards, when India ratifies the intellectual property treaty of the WTO - did it already?). So Cipla produces substances protected by patents in the West by a different method. ... ... The remaining sources are very much aimed at the German market and the insurance situation here. ... ------- End of Forwarded Message ________________________________ Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.de/ Organisation: projekt oekonux.de _______________________ http://www.oekonux.org/
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