I love that all the work will be going into the public domain!! Patents are one of the primary reasons healthcare costs are so high, yet this fact usually goes unspoken.
The real problem is the friction that the current intellectual property regime puts into the system. When you're dealing with a better computer chip, IP issues are not such a big deal, but when you are dealing with someone's health and survival, any delay can be deadly. What needs to be developed is a system where the biggest payoff is for achieving the ultimate award and there are actually incentives for sharing and cooperation. Such incentives could take different forms other than monetary. Anyhow.. the system as it sits is not appropriate for maximum acceleration of development of therapies and we need to work with the best experts in those fields on strategies to create one that will. If the public ask for it, it will happen.
I quite agree. The current IP system was designed in the early Industrial Revolution and was designed to give Monopolies control over product production exclusively for such a long period of time that either the product would have become obsolete by the time the patent expired, or so that the single company had such a massive competing edge that no one would be able to catch up. It also allowed companies to sit on inventions which could have out competed their existing products. If you wonder around the net, you'll find all sorts of evidence for inventions that got bought up and set on by different large corporations. I once submitted an idea to SONY for using micropower impulse radar for a sensor device to enable cheap VR body tracking, and even though they rejected the idea, I was told that they now had the rights to it and I couldn't submit it to any other company. It's my idea, not SONYs, so what right do they have to tell me who I can tell it to?
IP rights are a dinosaur that needs to be made extinct. A new system designed for the digital age needs to be implemented. I have no idea for what that system should be, but the current system is meant for an era of monopolies that we supposedly decided were bad for the free market decades ago, and yet the tools that allow monopolies to exist are still in force.