An interesting take on Drug Patents!

[CaTeacher]

I have several friends from India, and they told me a very interesting thing! It seems that India is usually one of the first countries to come out with generic versions of popular drugs (much much cheaper than US or even European versions).

This is because patent law in India does NOT protect the chemical compound, it protects the PROCESS!!! I think this is brilliant!

OK--so basically, in most of the world the compound and some structural analogs are protected, so if a competitor makes anything too close to the structure of the original drug-they cannot market it.

But--in India, where the process is patented--as long as a clever chemist can come up with another way to make a drug--they can put the exact same chemical compound on the market--and the competition makes it cheaper!

This sounds very smart to me! And it rewards clever people (it takes a clever person to patent an innovative process).

What do people think about this?

[AndyP]

1. knowing how hard chemical synthesis is first hand

I would say this is a pretty good idea. But some drugs are natrual compounds comming from bacteria or plants and they would be hard to patent this way.

[Voice_of_Europe]

2. standard processes should not be patented

hmm...
As far as my Chemistry knowledge goes:
There are many standard processes to add another Oxygene atom here and another NH2 group there.
I think many times it's hard to "find another way" to achieve the same compound.

So the total process to achieve a chemical compound from scratch consists of many many standard process steps and I don't know if just the combination of standard processses should be patented.

You take a car and a computer and a watch and then you patent the computerized-car-watch-glueing-process ?