2/19: Patents without Patents: Regulatory Incentives for Innovation in the Drug Industry

February 19, 2014 12:00 PM Wasserstein Hall 1015
1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge

In the pharmaceutical industry, patents are the preeminent incentive for innovation in developing new drugs.  But patents aren’t the whole story; regulatory agencies also offer different forms of exclusivity—enforced by the agencies themselves—to encourage different forms of innovation in the industry.  This panel will discuss actual and potential roles for those rewards in the context of developing new drugs, new uses for old drugs, and new ways to make drugs, in both the United States and the European Union. Panelists include:

  • Benjamin N. Roin, Hieken Assistant Professor in Patent Law, Harvard Law School; Faculty Co-Director, the Petrie-Flom Center
  • W. Nicholson Price II, Academic Fellow, the Petrie-Flom Center
  • Timo Minssen, Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen Faculty of Law; Visiting Scholar, the Petrie-Flom Center
  • Moderator, Aaron Kesselheim, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School; Director of the Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL), Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital

This event is free and open to the public. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact petrie-flom@law.harvard.edu or  617-495-2316.

TOMORROW: Second Annual Health Law Year in P/Review

Please join us for our second annual Health Law Year in P/Review event, co-sponsored by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School and the New England Journal of Medicine. The conference will be held in Wasserstein Hall, Milstein East C at Harvard Law School on Friday, January 31, 2014, from 8:30am to 5:00pm.

This year we will welcome experts discussing major developments over the past year and what to watch out for in areas including the Affordable Care Act, medical malpractice, FDA regulatory policy, abortion, contraception, intellectual property in the life sciences industry, public health policy, and human subjects research.

The full agenda is available on our website. Speakers are:  Read More

1/31: Second Annual Health Law Year in P/Review

Please join us for our second annual Health Law Year in P/Review event, co-sponsored by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School and the New England Journal of Medicine. The conference will be held in Wasserstein Hall, Milstein East C at Harvard Law School on Friday, January 31, 2014, from 8:30am to 5:00pm.

This year we will welcome experts discussing major developments over the past year and what to watch out for in areas including the Affordable Care Act, medical malpractice, FDA regulatory policy, abortion, contraception, intellectual property in the life sciences industry, public health policy, and human subjects research.

The full agenda is available on our website. Speakers are:  Read More

Three Parents and a Baby

By Nicholson Price

There’s an interesting post up on the New York Times’ Well Blog about children with three biological parents—in this case, three genetic parents.  Here, a mother and a father provided chromosomal DNA (i.e., the standard 23 chromosomes from each leading to the diploid 46 chromosomes), and another woman provided the egg, which included DNA found in the mitochondria (the “powerhouses of the cell” which are found in the cytoplasm of the egg).  The idea behind this practice is that women with problems in their mitochondria can still have healthy children with their own genetic material.  While it’s not that unusual to talk about children with three biological parents (two genetic and one gestational, as happens frequently with a surrogate mother or egg donor), we don’t often think on examples with three genetic parents (and the potential for a fourth biological (gestational)).

Read More

1/31: Second Annual Health Law Year in P/Review conference

Please join us for our second annual Health Law Year in P/Review event, co-sponsored by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School and the New England Journal of Medicine. The conference will be held in Wasserstein Hall, Milstein East C at Harvard Law School on Friday, January 31, 2014, from 8:30am to 5:00pm.

This year we will welcome experts discussing major developments over the past year and what to watch out for in areas including the Affordable Care Act, medical malpractice, FDA regulatory policy, abortion, contraception, intellectual property in the life sciences industry, public health policy, and human subjects research.

The full agenda is available on our website. Speakers are:  Read More

Great piece on ER pricing

By Nicholson Price

The New York Times has posted another installment of its excellent series, “Paying Till it Hurts,” by Elisabeth Rosenthal, this time on the astonishingly high costs of emergency room visits.  The piece is worth a read in full for its infuriating detail—really, I think the whole series is—but the message is pretty clear.  I’d also be remiss in not noting that the basic message, with its own set of excruciating details, was laid out in Steven Brill’s piece in Time magazine back in March.  But it’s such a big issue that it deserves this kind of attention.

The basic point is that the costs charged by hospitals are incredibly high, highly variable, and invariably opaque.  Hospitals price procedures, products, and everything else based on the typically secret (but not in California!) “chargemaster,” which lists sticker prices for everything.  Hospital executives speaking about the chargemaster say no one pays sticker price.  That may be true, but the discounts from sticker are almost totally opaque, which hampers the market’s cost-checking role (the Times piece describes Sutter Health contracts as having “gag clauses” so that insurers who negotiate with Sutter can’t tell the employers who are paying for the insurance what rates have been negotiated).  In addition, lots of locales are dominated by one or two hospital systems, which consolidate then raise prices without worrying much about competition.  Finally, most people aren’t comparison shopping for an ER visit anyway – even if they could.

The effect of opacity and consolidation looks to be pretty regressive—even if no one plays the sticker price, the people paying closest to it are those without insurance, who have no prenegotiated discounts and no one to argue on their behalf.  Cal. Pacific’s CEO, Dr. Warren Browner, argues for opacity for pseudo-progressive goal of fleecing rich foreigners (“You don’t really want to change your charges if you have a Saudi sheikh come in with a suitcase full of cash who’s going to pay full charges.”), but that seems a lot rarer than near-poor coming in to ERs uninsured and getting billed full fare (especially if, a la a certain recent presidential candidate, ERs are our health care system for the uninsured).

As in the rest of the US health care system, higher costs appear to be totally divorced from quality of care or outcomes (national variation here (pdf), international comparison here).

It’s hard to see what effect PPACA/ACA/Obamacare might have on this problem.  The Independent Payment Advisory Board has lots of power (or will once it has members), but is still Medicare-focused.  Cost-savings in Medicaid or Medicare payments might spill over into the private insurance market, but if the opacity and market power mechanisms remain, it’s not obvious to me how and why that would really happen.  Medicare is already paying by care episode much more than private insurers, who are still usually fee-for-service.  More competition and transparency might help (More vigorous antitrust enforcement?  Required disclosure of billed/paid costs? (maybe, but maybe not)).  Maybe the fact that more people will be insured will make a difference; if the biggest burden is borne by the uninsured, who have little leverage, lowering that numbermight lower the burden.  But it could also just make it even more unfair for those who remain outside the system.

[UPDATE 12/5/13: I missed Section 9007 of the act, which requires charitable hospitals to publish their chargemasters and prohibits charging chargemaster rates to individuals who qualify for financial assistance (instead, they’d be charged insurer-negotiated rates).  Unfortunately, the implementing regulations haven’t been promulgated by HHS or Treasury, so these provisions aren’t yet applicable.  But eventually they may help, once they’re implemented.  Steven Brill has a piece on this here, and Sarah Alder here.]

In any case, the Times piece is worth a read.  And so are the previous four entries (on colonoscopies, pregnancy, joint replacement (with a nice discussion of medical tourism), and prescription drugs).

Significant paper on GMO food risks retracted

By Nicholson Price

In the debate over whether genetically modified organisms should be allowed in the food supply or labeled when they’re used, a central question is whether GMOs are any more dangerous to people eating them than other foods.  This is far from the only concern raised by GMOs—that list includes things like the dangers of pervasive monoculture over diversity, intellectual property issues about crop ownership, the loss of traditional food sources, and the unintentional spread of modified organisms—but it’s a big one, and a major lever of consumer engagement.

In this debate, a significant piece of evidence frequently cited by the anti-GMO camp was a 2012 study by Seralini et al. that rats fed Roundup-ready corn were more likely to develop cancers (Roundup-ready corn is sold by Monsanto and is resistant to its popular herbicide Roundup).  I say was because the journal, Food and Chemical Toxicology, has just retracted the paper.  The paper was hugely controversial—which certainly isn’t justification for retraction—but that controversy prompted the editors to take a closer look at the raw data, after which they concluded that the number of rats studied was too low to justify the paper’s conclusions.

This episode unfortunately illustrates, among other things, the problems with intense media attention to early scientific reports, and with research-as-weapon rather than research-as-information.  Part of the hubbub came from the draconian embargo imposed on journalists before the article was published: because journalists weren’t permitted to seek any independent evaluation before publication of the article, many media reports ran enthusiastic coverage of the article before the scientific community started pointing out the many flaws in the research.  The eventual feedback from the scientific community—part two of peer review, when publications are criticized in the literature and addressed by letters and other publications—was certainly powerful, and led to the retraction.  But that doesn’t change the fact of its initial publication, and I’d bet quite a bit that the article will be cited for years to come as evidence that there’s not scientific consensus on this issue.  In fact, in a depressingly unsurprising development, Seralini is threatening to sue the journal over the retraction.

(For more on GMOs on Bill of Health, Kuei-Jung Ni just posted about the failure of the GMO-labeling initiative in Washington state, Glenn Cohen has written on the frankenburger, and I’ve written briefly about GMO crops spreading and intellectual property issues with GMO seeds.)

GIM: Informed consent for return of incidental findings in genomic research

By Nicholson Price

In the second installment of our new collaboration with Genetics in Medicine, we are highlighting an article released last week discussing informed consent for the return of incidental findings in genomic research.

As whole-genome and whole-exome sequencing become increasingly common in medical research, the potential grows for identifying genetic findings that are unrelated to the main focus of the study (often called “incidental findings,” or “IFs”).  There is substantial debate about the duties associated with incidental findings, including whether researchers should or must search for them under ethical or legal frameworks, and whether and how to return the results to research participants.  One understudied aspect of the issue, though, is how informed consent should be obtained for the return of such findings, and this paper begins the task of addressing that question. Read More

Foodborne illness and the government shutdown

By Nicholson Price

This story is still developing, so this post will just be a quick pointer.  You may have seen news stories about how FDA isn’t inspecting foods, and 90% of seafood isn’t getting inspected.  And these are all worries about problems that we think might happen.

Well, the problems have started.  Salmonella-contaminated chicken has sickened 278 people across 18 states.  The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) is still operating as an excepted activity (pdf link, see page 2), and has announced the outbreak but the CDC may be unable to do interstate surveillance of the outbreak (exactly what CDC is able to do during the shutdown is a bit unclear).  And FSIS only covers meat, poultry, and eggs.  FDA, which inspects most other foods, won’t be doing so as long as the government is shut down.

And for folks who happen to go to the USDA site looking for answers (as opposed to linking right to the FSIS), they’ll get this message: “Due to the lapse in federal government funding, this website is not available.”