David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Amazing. Novo, undeterred, go and work around Nordisk's patents on this. Again, I'm not sure at this point if the laws have changed and you can patent drugs in Denmark, but it doesn't matter, because it's clear that Denmark is not a very large country. By far, the bulk of the market is in exports at this point, and certainly in other countries, you can patent drugs. Novo works around Nordisk's patents, and they come out with an improved version of protamine Insulin that they claim is both better and doesn't infringe on the patents. Which the pharma industry has a rich history of figuring out exactly how to do this. The thing about pharma patents, which is interesting, is they're fairly narrow. You can patent a molecule. I don't think this is quite true at the time. But the way it works today is you patent a molecule, which is extremely specific. It's different than other industries, where it's a system and a method for blah, blah, blah, and you can be very broad with it. If you can accomplish a similar biological or chemical reaction in the body with a different molecule in basically any way, then unpatented. There's a rich history in pharma of doing exactly this what is slightly next to the patent, but does basically the same thing.…

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