In terms of getting bang for the buck, when it comes to innovation policy, I always think it is a bit weird that basically our industrial policy for developing the pharmaceutical sector is based on how much we will pay out of the health budget. For me, the health budget should be paying for health services and not for developing industrial sectors.
With regard to barriers to innovation, I did my post-doc at the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy and we worked a lot on the whole question of pharmaceutical patents, especially with biologics. We need to understand that patent protection can help innovation and help to attract R and D investment, but it can also be a barrier to therapeutic innovation. The thing is if you have new research based on a specific biomarker, and if in terms of the genes there are already 40 companies that own patents over the genes you need to do some research on in order to develop your product, basically there is no financial interest for you to develop this type of research.
So what do you do? Well, you stick to the drugs you already own and you try to work from those molecules and try to adapt them a little bit and find a new patent on those, rebrand it, and resell it.
It's not only that. Just in terms of basic research, I was talking with people at the University of Minnesota at one point and they were telling me it cost them $26,000 just to find out if there might be a possibility they were infringing on a patent. They were doing the research and they didn't know if there were patents. They didn't care, but they needed to spend $26,000 just to kick-start the research to know if they were infringing upon patents or not. So patents are becoming more a part of the problem rather than the solution to this sometimes.