Utan patent tog forskningen ett språng!

In 2003, a group of scientists and executives from the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the drug and medical-imaging industries, universities and nonprofit groups joined in a project that experts say had no precedent: a collaborative effort to find the biological markers that show the progression of Alzheimer’s disease in the human brain.

Now, the effort is bearing fruit with a wealth of recent scientific papers on the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s using methods like PET scans and tests of spinal fluid. More than 100 studies are under way to test drugs that might slow or stop the disease.

And the collaboration is already serving as a model for similar efforts against Parkinson’s disease.

The key to the Alzheimer’s project was an agreement as ambitious as its goal: not just to raise money, not just to do research on a vast scale, but also to share all the data, making every single finding public immediately, available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world.

No one would own the data. No one could submit patent applications, though private companies would ultimately profit from any drugs or imaging tests developed as a result of the effort.

“It was unbelievable,” said Dr. John Q. Trojanowski, an Alzheimer’s researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s not science the way most of us have practiced it in our careers. But we all realized that we would never get biomarkers unless all of us parked our egos and intellectual-property noses outside the door and agreed that all of our data would be public immediately.”

The idea, Dr. Buckholtz said, was that the government’s National Institutes of Health “could serve as an honest broker between the pharmaceutical industry and academia.”

Soon, Dr. Richard J. Hodes, the director of the National Institute on Aging, was on the phone with Dr. Steven M. Paul, a former scientific director at the National Institute of Mental Health who had recently left to head central-nervous-system research at Eli Lilly. Dr. Paul offered to ask other drug companies to raise money.

It turned out to be relatively easy to get companies to agree, Dr. Paul said. It had become clear that the problem of finding good diagnostic tools was huge and complex. “We were better off working together than individually,” he said.

At first, the collaboration struck many scientists as worrisome — they would be giving up ownership of data, and anyone could use it, publish papers, maybe even misinterpret it and publish information that was wrong.

But Alzheimer’s researchers and drug companies realized they had little choice.

“Companies were caught in a prisoner’s dilemma,” said Dr. Jason Karlawish, an Alzheimer’s researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. “They all wanted to move the field forward, but no one wanted to take the risks of doing it.”

Tänka sig, ett empiriskt bevis för att Piratpartiet faktiskt har rätt:

En allmänt accepterad sanning är att läkemedelspatent är enda möjligheten att finansiera forskning och framställning av nya preparat, något som inte är sant.

Det är redan idag staten som bekostar huvuddelen av all läkemedelsforskning, eftersom det är staten som står för över 85% av läkemedelsbolagens intäkter. Om staten istället upphandlade forskningen på nya läkemedel separat, och släppte konkurrensen på att tillverka preparaten fri genom avskaffningen av medicinpatent, skulle det leda till kraftigt minskade läkemedelsutgifter, även om mer pengar än idag avsattes för forskningen.

Genom att man frångick patent och att forskningsresultatet nu är tillgängligt online så har alla vunnit på det, patienter, medicinföretag, universitet osv. Hade man inte vågat ta det här steget och samarbetat öppet hade ingen vågat ge sig på det här arbetet och Alzheimers hade fortsatt vara en fruktansvärd sjukdom som drabbar både patienter och deras anhöriga hårt. Tack vare det här steget finns det nu hopp om lindring och kanske till och med en bot, vilket inte bara givetvis minskar det personliga lidandet för de som drabbas av sjukdomen, det sparar också samhället enorma vårdpengar som kan användas till bättre saker.

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