On 10/28/06, "Lennert Böhm" <Lennert.Boehm(a)gmx.de> wrote:
Hi geni, Rest,
obviously we can't start building a lab in St. Petersburg or wherever and make the
drugs >ourselves. But if the patents were released into Public Domain, prices would
drop. Just >think of the prices of e.g. Tylenol or Ibuprofen.
Paracetamol is trivial to make and uses readily availible precursors.
Ibuprofen is probably slightly more difficult and has that chiral
centre although it appears that almost everyone just uses a racemic
mix.
Even say AZT is rather harder to make
Patents on drugs only last 20 years in any case so you would only be
speeding the entry to the public domain by a few years. I'm sorry but
getting rid of the patents on the anti HIV drugs is not the magic
bullet that certian people made it out to be.
--
geni