Word: biotech
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...overhaul the nation's health-care system. It's understandable the drugmakers would want a roll-call accounting of who their friends and enemies are, considering the size of the investment they are making on Capitol Hill: in the first six months of this year alone, drug and biotech companies and their trade associations spent more than $110 million - that's about $609,000 a day - to influence lawmakers, according to figures compiled by the nonpartisan watchdog group Center for Responsive Politics. The drug industry's legion of registered lobbyists numbers 1,228, or 2.3 for every member of Congress...
...foster cost-saving competition without killing the financial incentives that have put the U.S. biotechnology industry at the vanguard of medical science and without stifling the development of even more drugs that could save lives and eliminate suffering. Finding that equilibrium goes to the question of how long biotech firms should be guaranteed exclusivity, outside the protection of their patents, before copycats can begin using the data they have developed...
...Eshoo's successful amendment to the Energy and Commerce Committee bill would extend that to 12 years of exclusivity, as would legislation passed a few weeks earlier by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee. Then-chairman Ted Kennedy, whose state of Massachusetts is home to many biotech firms, had long supported a 12-year exclusivity period. The industry showed its gratitude last year when Amgen, one of the biggest biotech firms, donated $5 million - twice the size of the next largest donation - to a nonprofit educational institute being built in Kennedy's honor. (Watch TIME's video...
...After obtaining patents, Harvard licenses a number of the technologies it develops in its labs, such as organic compounds, vaccines, and diagnostics, to biotech and pharmaceutical companies for development into finished products. At present, there is no institutionalized mechanism to guarantee that drugs created from university research can be produced generically. Allowing generic production breaks the temporary monopoly a pharmaceutical company holds on a product that is guaranteed by its patent. With more companies able to produce a product, free-market competition drives down its price, and as its cost decreases, more people gain access to the drug. At present...
...This system must change. Without a standardized means to require generic production of certain technologies, Harvard effectively endorses the needless death and suffering of millions of people in the developing world. Instead, when it licenses a compound to a biotech or pharmaceutical company, the university should mandate that the drug created from that compound be allowed to be produced generically in developing countries, a move that would inherently lower the drug’s price...