Political Quotes

“Kathryn Nagel--who will be an extraordinary physician because she has not only a great mind, but she also has a great heart--is absolutely right. Drug companies today have moved far from the outreaching motives of insulin's original discovery. Advancements in biotechnology have allowed manufacturers to make slightly more purified and precise versions of insulin, but it works the same as Dr. Banting's original insulin from the 1920s because that is what our body needs to do its work. Even incremental changes to an insulin product open up new patent opportunities for manufacturers and companies that have been taking advantage of these loopholes in our patent system for too long at the expense of patients and their families. Let me give one particularly egregious example. Sanofi manufactures the insulin product Lantus. Sanofi filed a total of 74 patents on Lantus, with 95 percent of those applications happening after Lantus was introduced to the market in the year 2000. That is a variation of insulin--almost 20 years old--protected by 74 patents way beyond the life of the original patent on a medicine discovered 100 years ago by a doctor who said, ``Insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world.'' Sanofi has constructed such an elaborate web and tangle of patents surrounding their product that they could have a competition- free monopoly on their particular version of insulin for 37 years.…”