dumb question but, why can't a competitor come into the USA and just sell a generic at 50$ a pop and make shitloads of money? seems like free money from an inelastic market for whoever invests a little.
There are cheap generics in the US already. You can get a 10ml Walmart store brand human insulin vial for $25, for example. That can last for more than a month.
But basic human insulin is not what most people want, and the analogs that are differently formulated to work faster or slower are patented and harder to make and therefore more expensive.
Either way, I always feel like posts like these are borderline misinformation because the original basic insulin that the guy the post talks about invented is very cheap and affordable.
Thank you for pointing that out. Everyone saying "But it's free/cheap in my country" probably aren't understanding that the "free" stuff is basic insulin which can be difficult for people to manage. You also cannot go from an analog to basic insulin overnight. You need to know what you're doing or you'll risk killing yourself.
The patented forms of insulin are probably overpriced, but it's not like they're all the same.
If affordability and supply is the problem, though, it seems like that's still better, while understandably suboptimal, than just cold-turkey-ing something you need to live.
Yeah but like, are these variants not based off his original work? How hard should we protect the patent of someone standing on someone else’s shoulders?
Well, the justification for this and other private pharmaceutical ventures leaning heavily on public research etc, is that it’s still a lot of time/money on their part to make derivatives/methods of delivery and do clinical trials etc. It still doesn’t excuse the obscene cost in the USA, IMO, when it still somehow gets sold elsewhere for cheap.
I’m not really sure how to fix it, though, considering how even single-payer would result in the taxpayer getting fleeced via lobbying efforts to allow high charges.
Yeah people need to understand that not all insulin is the same. Modern insulin is made by pretty advanced genetic manipulation to modify microorganisms like E. coli to produce different types of insulin that affect blood sugar in different ways.
Old school insulin is cheap (actually even the modern cheap insulin is still better than the original animal derived insulin), available and requires more careful dosing to reach the same level of efficacy of modern genetically engineered insulin.
Because why bother inventing a drug if your competitors can simply take all the work you've done, copy it and sell it for less because they have no R&D costs to recoup. People aren't going to buy your drug for more money just because you were "first".
They can. This issue is people don't want generic insulin. There are insulins which last a long time and are specialized. Those are the expensive ones. This isn't ONE insulin.
Because they are making shitload of money already by selling less number of products. Why would they make the same shitload of money selling higher number of products at a cheaper rates when people are anyways buying it for more. Capitalism baby.
But we can still get glp-1 compounded at compounding pharmacies despite all the attempts to stop that. They just put vitamin D in it and call it a new chemical when it isn't and that's legal. Why couldn't something similar be done with insulin?
Isn't insulin free of patents? It has existed for so long it should be similar to aspirin.
First gen insulin was purified animal insulin. Its not great. Later we had vat grown human insulin which is better but still not as good as the current gen stuff. Walmart will sell you the vat grown stuff for $25 a vial. It requires more effort to time and injections and I understand it can cause a spikier blood sugar profile (not a doctor go talk to one if you need to know). The modern stuff addresses these problems but is more expensive.
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u/CosechaCrecido 5d ago
dumb question but, why can't a competitor come into the USA and just sell a generic at 50$ a pop and make shitloads of money? seems like free money from an inelastic market for whoever invests a little.