It's past time to bring Big Pharma to heel, so many of their abuses take place simply because government allows them to.
The level they've stood to benefit from publicly funded and conducted research even compared to most other sectors is laughable. It's the universities and government labs who not only explain the mechanisms for disease and develop therapy strategies but also validate the drug targets and sometimes even identify the prototype compound before the intellectual property is transferred to the private sector for development. There's hardly an FDA approved drug in this decade that the NIH didn't have a hand in.
The NIH, which US taxpayers fund to the order of $35 billion a year. It's a resource they're allowed to utilize carte blanche and there's no intellectual property rights for scientific research, be it in condensed matter physics, bio-chemistry, molecular biology, genetics or any other field. That's not to say the developer shouldn't be allowed to reap a share of spoils for their creations or not have them protected, just that the overall benefits are disproportionate and could probably do well to be spread across the breadth of society a little more than they are.
In terms of patents on the whole across all industries, not only are they difficult to enforce but the transactional costs are exceedingly high these days. The flip side to this is how difficult that makes it for innovative small businesses and even when they do breakthrough, they're often quickly gobbled up and the patent becomes owned by an entity which put up neither the original funding nor research. It's not a massive problem but there's something to be said for class gaps in patenting and it's hardly surprising the majority of holders come from affluent families.
