Patents pharmaceutical industry

One appHcation patented ia 1989 is the injection of sodium alumiaate into silica-containing formations for enhanced petroleum recovery (39). Additionally, the pharmaceutical industry uses sodium alumiaate as an alkaline source of aluminum for the production of certain antacids (40). 

Sakakibara,S.and Yamanaka,T. U.S. Patent 3,749,705 July 31,1973 assigned to Yoshitomi Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (Japan)... 

Yoshitomi Pharmaceutical Industries, Ltd. British Patent 1,272,497 April 26,1972... 

M. Sumi, Japan Patent 12224 (1960), to Takeda Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. Chem. Abstr. 55 10325a (1961). 

The pharmaceutical industry is precisely one of the sectors in which patents have most impact. The general arguments that are formulated on the subject of technical information are fully applicable to the pharmaceutical environment. Thus in Spain, for example, pharmaceuticals are the third sector in terms of investment, behind automobiles and food. The two questions we must ask are whether there would be less investment and poorer results if patents did not exist, and to what extent results are achieved with the existing patent protection. Nevertheless, these two questions are not easy to answer. Furthermore,... 

This chapter offers an overview of the role played by technical information in the development of innovation and the necessary incentives for its creation, and at the same time the implications for the pharmaceutical sector. To this end, we present the basis and the significance of the patent system, we offer an analysis of the impact of this system, and lasdy we present a reflection on the future of the system and its relationship with the pharmaceutical industry. 

Three submarkets of the pharmaceutical market can be distinguished innovative patented products sold by prescription, products whose patent has expired and are sold by prescription, and products sold without a prescription. The public regulation of prices in the first of these submarkets, and often also in the second, is a fact that can be observed in most Western countries, with certain notable exceptions such as the USA. Concern about the particular characteristics of the pharmaceutical market (for example, the existence of patents and the pharmaceutical industry s rate of return), together with the desire to provide the majority of the population with access to medicines, regardless of their ability to pay (in many countries the public sector is the main buyer in this market), has led to the fairly widespread adoption of more or less strict price intervention and control policies for pharmaceuticals. 

The innovative pharmaceutical industry is one of the clearest exponents of the familiar process of the globalization of the economy. The reasons for this are obvious first, companies need to recover the huge investment in R D that is necessary to get an innovative medicinal product with added therapeutic value onto the market. Second, the cost of transporting pharmaceuticals is usually low in comparison with the economic value of the product, which facilitates the geographical extension of markets. Finally, the company does not even need to transport goods, as it can limit itself to selling technology, especially if the innovation is protected by a system of patents, and this facilitates international expansion even more. 

Caves, R.E., M.D. Whinston and M.A. Hurwitz (1991), Patent expiration, entry, and competition in the US pharmaceutical industry , Brooking Papers on Economic Activity, 1991, 1-66. 

Patents are of paramount importance to the pharmaceutical industry. At the discovery program level, chemotype patentability is one of the key requirements for continued work on a particular structural class. Decisions by venture capitalists to fund startup companies are based, in part, on the strength of their patent portfolios. The presence or absence of a single key patent can determine the future of even the largest pharmaceutical company. Patents thus are a critical, inseparable component of the drug discovery process. 

There are distinct advantages of these solvent-free procedures in instances where catalytic amounts of reagents or supported agents are used since they provide reduction or elimination of solvents, thus preventing pollution at source . Although not delineated completely, the reaction rate enhancements achieved in these methods may be ascribable to nonthermal effects. The rationalization of microwave effects and mechanistic considerations are discussed in detail elsewhere in this book [25, 193]. A dramatic increase in the number of publications [23c], patents [194—203], a growing interest from pharmaceutical industry, with special emphasis on combinatorial chemistry, and development of newer microwave systems bodes well for micro-wave-enhanced chemical syntheses. 

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