Thanks for your comment. I agree that independent researchers with nonprofit motivations play a capital role in repurposing and should be offered funding and open access to high quality databases. However, pharmaceutical companies have access to large amount of data and resources that can accelerate the process of finding new uses for existing molecules.
Leaving them completely out would mean losing a lot of potential for bringing new solutions for patients faster. If you ask me, the ideal model would be an open collaboration between members of the industry and academics, one can always dream.
Certainly, I agree that the industry has an incentive problem concerning repurposing that for now leads mainly to disinterest. Even if they find a new use for an off patent molecule and reformulate it slightly so they can patent it, they cannot be sure that doctors will not prescribe the cheaper generic off label.
Allowing pharmaceutical companies to have patent monopoly for repurposed drugs would definitely be a terrible solution for this problem that would lead to a situation similar to what you describe. But there are innovative solutions in this space to try to align the incentives of the industry with those of the general population, one example is the Social Impact Bonds I link in the article.
The basic idea would be to award payments to the industry dependent only on successful outcomes (eg. reaching certain efficacy threshold in a randomized clinical trial of an off-patent drug for a new indication), this way they would assume the risk but will have an economic incentive to fund the best ideas, while the drugs remain cheap and patent free.
If you find it interesting, you can read more about it here: https://crowdfundedcures.medium.com/?p=27a4be8a6565 .
I also think that models that allow for patent fractionalization and sharing between stakeholders with different motivations, like the IP-NFT framework developed by Molecule that VitaDAO uses could help with that without leading to an increase in prizes.
Estéfano
