Wall Street Wants the Best Patents, Not the Best Drugs - Curing diseases like Hepatitis C just doesn’t pay. By Joe Nocera - Bloomberg Opinion

Enter a group called the Initiative for Medicines, Access and Knowledge, or I-MAK for short. I-MAK is funded in part by John Arnold, a billionaire energy trader who once worked at Enron. Its mission is to challenge key pharma patents in an effort to enable generic competition and bring down the price of important, life-saving drugs. Tahir Amin, one of I-MAK’s co-founders, told me that his group had had its eye on Sovaldi as long ago as 2012, even before the drug received approval by the Food and Drug Administration. I-MAK’s position is that the basic compound at the heart of Gilead’s drugs, sofosbuvir, is simply not novel enough to merit 20 years patent protection.
 
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