The Medicines Patent Pool was created to promote public health, facilitating generic licensing for patented drugs that treat diseases predominantly affecting low- and middle-income countries.
Drug repurposing can redeem failed treatments and squeeze out new uses from others. But many pharmaceutical companies are hesitant to retool existing drugs without a high return on investment.
Changes in the latest federal budget will mostly affect people who need multiple medicines throughout the year, perhaps for chronic disease. But there are other ways to reduce drug costs.
Generic drug names are often long, but they can tell doctors what type of medicine it is and how it works. But it’s brand names that appear first and most prominently in Health Canada materials.
Yelena Ionova, University of California, San Francisco
There are ingredients in your pills other than the one designed to treat your ailments. Those unnamed ingredients can alter how you respond to a medicine or even make you sick.
Drug shortages occur regularly in the US, even in the best of times. The pharmaceutical supply chain embodies ‘just in time’ shipping and has little built-in redundancy.
As drug prices soar, consumers look for cheaper generics. A recent study showed safety issues in some generics made abroad, however, suggesting that the FDA’s honor system may not be enough to ensure safety.
Biologics, therapies made inside or of living cells, are a growing share of pharmaceutical sales. But the cost of these miracle treatments makes them unaffordable for many. New FDA guidance may help.
Insurance companies sometimes try to cut costs by substituting less expensive drugs for a specific drug prescription. That’s raising problems in many cases, and actually causing harm.
Small-batch brewers are starting to tinker with biologic drugs to meet their own medical needs. A side effect of their success would be a disruption to how big pharma makes and distributes drugs.
A push towards prescribing generic medications rather than their branded equivalents, as flagged in the budget, may have benefits beyond simple cost savings.
Clinton, who named drug companies among her enemies in this week’s debate, is pushing populist-inspired policies that could hamper the flow of new medicines.