大学英语辩论

THW abolishing patents for life-saving medicines

Thank you, pro speaker. Ladies and Gentlemen, good morning.

Now, I’d like to provide my statements.

For the first aspect, I want to say is the cost.

Medicines cost a lot to come to market, patents are the only way to recoup that co st.

Bringing a drug to market is expensive. In addition to the costs of scientists and l aboratories to discover and sift through potentially therapeutic compounds in th e first place, demonstrating efficacy and safety to the Food and Drug Administrati on requires costly clinical trials. Without F.D.A. approval, a drug cannot be market ed. Drug manufacturers say that they need to recoup the high cost of drug develo pment by charging high prices during the period they hold effective monopolies.

A recent estimate, though contested, put the price of developing a drug from scra tch as high as $2.6 billion. Other estimates suggest it could be as low as $161 mill ion. Either way, it’s a lot of money. Without regulatory constraints, results from s uch an investment could be used by anyone to develop and market drugs. What’smore, In my view

Abolishing patents for life-saving medicines would not decline the price of medici nes.The prop have founded their case on the idea that lots of generic producers will be able to produce drugs cheaply if patents are bypassed. However, there needs to be a massive incentive to get these drugs developed in the first place. They cost u p to $800 million to get to market, and this means huge amounts of investment ar e required. Not only does this investment need to be payed back, there needs to b e a promise of strong profit to pay off the risk of such a huge investment being un successfulbecause most drugs never go to market. As patents provide the ability t o charge monopoly pricing, if there was no patent for life-saving drugs there wou ld need to be an even greater incentive to stop companies producing non-life savi ng drugs instead. What this means is that whatever model the prop propose to pr ovide these incentives, it will always be more expensive than allowing a company to patent a product, which at least makes it as valuable as a non-life saving drug. For the second aspect, I think abolish patents for life-saving medicines will lead to non-lifesaving drugs .

There are some potentially valuable drugs we‘ll never get drug companies to inve st in — those that cannot be patented.

To see evidence of this, just look at the behavior of pharmaceutical firms. It has beendiscovered that drug companies discard many potentially good ideas becaus e they‘re unpatentable. By interviewing academic researchers and industry insid ers and scouring medicinal-chemistry textbooks, Mr. Roin learned that ―pharma ceutical companies systematically screen their drug candidates to exclude the on es lacking strong patent protection.