Last week researchers at the Australian National University’s John Curtin School of Medical Research announced the discovery of a substance which in laboratory testing has stopped the AIDS virus. It will be some years, however, before the substance will find its way into a drug that can be taken by AIDS patients. The substance and the research behind it also have potential for work on other viral diseases, such as dengue, Ross River and Barmah Forest fevers, and there were also possible applications for the new drug — called C9 — in helping stroke and heart-attack sufferers.
Heady stuff, indeed.
But where to from here. The school’s Professor Peter Gage says funding is a critical question. On the AIDS application he said, “”We can’t take it any further; the resources really aren’t sufficient to take it any further.”
The research is one of several projects being funded through a new biotechnology investment company, BIOTRON, with Sydney businessman Peter Scott, the ANU and researchers at the John Curtin school. Mr Scott said they needed $12.5 million to progress seven projects with the potential to yield 13 products. BIOTRON aimed to support research which showed commercial potential, take it through to applied research and then license the results to pharmaceutical companies, using the income to pay a dividend to investors and fund more research. The aim was to keep research and the income it generated in Australia.
Professor Gage posed the other option. He said scientists could sell their discovery to overseas research companies now for a small sum, but could make much more money and generate jobs in Australia by pursuing the research.
It is a sad state of affairs that the options have narrowed so much: either flog off the idea overseas for a trifle and watch other capitalise on Australian ingenuity or corporatise and privatise ourselves.
The latter option is obviously the better of the two, but is it the best? The trouble with going down the corporate road is that there is a trade-off. Biotechnology companies want profits. The only way to make them is to patent the results of their research. The patent gives them a 20-year monopoly in which time no-one else can produce the drug. In return for the monopoly, which is protected by the courts, the company has to make its patent specification public and at the end of the 20-year period it is open for anyone to make – hence the production of generic drugs.
The trouble is not so much the 20-year monopoly because the public ultimately benefits from the public disclosure of the chemical forumlas and the method of synthesising the drug and the subsequent open market when the patent runs out.
No; the cost comes in the lead up to the granting of the patent. A patent can only be granted for original work, for innovation, by the person or corporation applying for the patent. It means that in the lead up to the patentable discovery work has to be done in secret. Any blabbing could jeopardise the patent because others might claim all or part of the discovery or the discovery might be held not to be an innovation, but part of the general research community’s knowledge base. In short it means an end to the long-held university ideal that knowledge is shared by all and is built upon through the generations. That is to be lammented. Because when knowledge and ideas are freely exchanged human understanding grows faster.
The trouble is that that ideal requires another element. The public, through its government, must recognise the value of knowledge and research. It pays its researchers and university teachers so that knowledge is added to for the public good.
Now that side of the bargain is not being adhered to. Increasing governments have become more dollar-driven. It has turned the rationale behind patent law on its head. Patent law was originally aimed at bringing into the public domain details of inventions and discoveries that might otherwise have remained secret. Now it is driving research that should be public into the private domain.
The sad thing is not that Professor Gage is going down the patent route, but rather that he feels he has to.