The patent system

Patent is a  exclusive property right.  in intangible creations of the human mind it is a reward. They
exist only as provided in the laws of sovereign states, and can be enforced only to the
extent that application has been made and a patent granted covering the territory of an
individual state. Patent rights are limited in duration, with the global standard being 20
years from the date of application. The new product, article of manufacture or process
described in the patent application must be something that has never been previously
disclosed anywhere in the world and something that would not be obvious to a person
ordinarily skilled in the field involved. Determinations of whether these requirements
have been met are made by comparing the claims of the patent applicant against the body
of published literature in the field, including previously issued patents. This process is
called examination, and it assures that no one is able to claim patent rights on anything
that already is existence.
Patents work differently indifferent industries. In the electronic industry patents are often
shared among competitors through pooling or cross licensing. This sharing is necessary
because a given product often contains many patented technologies. However, in the
pharmaceutical, chemical and biotechnology industries the patent normally equals the
product, and protects the extensive investment in research and clinical testing required
before placing it on the market. Patent protection for chemical and pharmaceutical
products is especially important compared with other industries because the actual
manufacturing process is often easy to replicate and can be copied with a fraction of the
investment of that required for the research and clinical testing.
The extensive cost required to produce a new pharmaceutical product has meant that
private sector investment in pharmaceutical innovation has been disproportionately
directed to products meeting the needs of patients in developed countries, particularly in
the United States, which combines strong patent protection with a market free of price
controls.
Until the TRIPS Agreement in 1994 many developing countries provided no patent
protection for pharmaceutical products. And, while countries that have joined the WTO
have obligated themselves to provide such protection, least developed countries are not
required to meet this obligation until 2016. The continuing lack of patent protection for
pharmaceutical products makes it very difficult to establish research-based industries in
most developing countries. Most medical research in these countries takes place in the
public sector. The lack of any means of patenting these inventions and the related lack of
experience in licensing them to the private sector, suppresses the development of
commercial enterprises focused on alleviating the disease burdens common to developing
countries.
The controversy over availability of patented therapies for the treatment of HIV disease
has resulted renewed interest in the compulsory licensing of pharmaceutical products.
After two years of discussion, the WTO Council recently affirmed that the TRIPS
Agreement permits such compulsory licenses in health emergencies, even in cases where

the compulsory license is for an imported product. However, to date, no compulsory
licenses actually have been issued, even though the threat of compulsory licensing has
been used as a means of seeking lower prices.
One danger in compulsory licensing is that it will discourage further the commercial R &
D necessary to new drugs to fight global epidemics. Another danger is that compulsory
licensing can be used to seek price levels below what a given national market is capable
of supporting, further concentrating the burden of financing pharmaceutical innovation
on developed country consumers and discouraging development of drugs targeted at the
disease burdens of countries using compulsory licenses.
There are promising developments in countries such as India and Brazil that are
beginning to use patents to develop commercial pharmaceutical industries that produce
products directed at local diseases and available at price that patients in those countries
can afford. Foundations and nonprofit organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation and OneWorld Health, Inc. are supporting such efforts. These efforts show
that developing countries have the capacity to build research-intensive pharmaceutical
industries capable of operating profitably in the conditions of the local market. However,
for such local industries to take root and grow, effective patent protection must be made
available, the commercialization of publicly funded research must be encouraged, and
compulsory licensing must be kept to a minimum. Wealthy countries can assist this
process by subsidizing local markets for the purchase of drugs through the Global Fund,
and by direct programs of assistance such as that recently proposed by President Bush.
Consumers in all countries can share the burden of drug development equitably by paying
for medicine at a price level consistent with their means, rather than attempting to shift
the costs of drug development to others.

What is a Patent?
A patent is a property right granted by a sovereign state to the inventor of a novel, nonobvious
and useful invention. Because the invention must be novel (meaning that it has
not been previously disclosed anywhere in the world) and because it cannot be obvious to
one ordinarily skilled in the art, the grant of the property right cannot interfere with the
public’s access to what already exists.
The owner of a patent has the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for
sale, or selling his or her invention for a period of 20 years from the filing of the patent
application. An invention is any new or useful process, machine, article of manufacture,
or composition of matter. An improvement on any of these items also can be an
invention. Patent rights are territorial in nature and exist only in the national jurisdictions
in which the patentee has applied for and received recognition of his property rights.
Whether a claimed invention meets the tests of novelty and non-obviousness is
determined by comparing it to the body of previously disclosed information in the same
field. This information is usually called “prior art.” The most commonly used prior art
consists of published patents that have already been issued or published by the world’s
patent offices.
While all countries require that the tests of novelty and non-obviousness be met before
patent rights can be enforced against in fringers, many countries do not determine whether
these tests have been met though a substantive examination as in the United States, Japan,
the U.K. and Germany. In counties, such as France, claims to patent rights are registered
with the state but not actually tested for their validity until or unless they are asserted in a
judicial proceeding. At that time the responsible judicial authorities engage in the fact finding
process necessary to determine whether the tests of patent ability have been met.
The benefit of granting an inventor the exclusive property right of a patent for the limited
period of 20 years is that he or she is given a powerful incentive to create. The inventor is
assured that investors will be given the incentive to commit the financial resources
necessary to support the inventor’s research and to develop it to the point where it can be
manufactured and made available to the market.

LETS KNOW ABOUT STRESS

Phases of the stress

There are three basic phases of the stress. Understanding these phases can help to identify and cope with the stress in life.

Phase I

Stressors trigger your body's response to stress. This physiological response is also known as the "fight or flight" response in your nervous system. Symptoms include:

• Increase in heart rate and blood pressure
• Decreased blood flow to the extremities
• Slowed digestion

The stress response is meant temporarily to improve chances of surviving a physical threat to safety (i.e., outrunning a predator), but becomes dangerous to health if activated for prolonged periods of time.

Troublesome events that can activate the stress experience include death, divorce, illness, conflict, job loss, and retirement. Other negative stressors are worries, memories, or images that are produced internally by our minds. Positive life events also trigger the stress response in our bodies. These include marriage, birth of a child, purchase of a new home, or starting a new job.

Phase II

Interpretation of stressors affects our ability to cope with stress. Our beliefs, attitudes, and values determine how we interpret and react to potentially stressful situations. The resulting feeling of helplessness sets up for a variety of unpleasant responses to stress.

Phase III

Reaction to stress might create or worsen physical, emotional, or behavioral symptoms if the fight or flight response is activated chronically over time.

• Physical — high blood pressure, heart disease, ulcers, strokes, rashes, migraine, tension headaches, infertility, irritable bowel
• Emotional — anxiety, depression, anger, forgetfulness, panic attacks
• Behavioral — overeating, poor appetite, drug abuse, excessive smoking, irritability, social withdrawal, insomnia .

THIS NOBEL WILL HELP PHARMACY TO GROW MORE

We all know that Nobel prize is a mark of excellence and the Nobel of chemistry this year is awarded to Martin Karplus and Michael Levitt ... and the matter of interest is that they got Nobel prize for a very interesting pharmacy related project well before i tell you about that lets have look on the careers of these two great scientists ........

MARTIN KARPLUS
Born in Austria and is an american Theoretical chemist He is the Theodore William Richards Professor of Chemistry, emeritus at Harvard University. He is also Director of the Biophysical Chemistry Laboratory,...after earning a BA degree from Harvard college he pursued  graduate studies from California institute of technology he completed his Ph.D in 1953 while working with Linus Pauling . Karplus has contributed to many fields in physical chemistry, including nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, chemical dynamics, quantum chemistry, and most notably, molecular dynamics simulations of biological macro molecules
MICHAEL LEVITT 
born in Pretoria, South Africa Is an American-British-Israeli biophysicist and a professor of structural biology at Stanford university since 1987 educated at kings college of London  He was a PhD student in Computational Biology at Peter house, Cambridge .he is one of the first researchers to conduct molecular dynamic simulations of DNA 

They got their Nobel prize for  Multiscale Models for Complex Chemical Systems 

What is multi scale models for complex chemical systems
Before 1970s the study of chemical structure was bit difficult becoz the 3d structure were prepared with plastic balls and sticks and in 1970 both Karplus and Levitt started working on a set of programs that made the study of the chemical process easy .The computer modelling has made it more easier to study the chemical process 
let me be more simple chemical reaction are very fast and are not easy to study with naked eyes in fractions of milliseconds electron jump from one atomic nucleus to other .classical chemistry has a hard time keeping up it is virtually impossible to experimentally map every little step in a chemical process scientists let computers unveil chemical processes, such as a catalyst's purification of exhaust fumes or the photosynthesis in green leaves.
for example working of protein it is impossible to see their chemical activity and to monitor them the observation of activities going there was nearly impossible becoz of speed and size of molecules but the program developed by karplus and Levitt make the study very easy becoz of 3d models developed by computer 

how it is important  
well it is not a question to be asked but let me explain when we will be able to study chemical process in more detail it will help us to clear our concept about body systems and will also help us to monitor the activity of drug into the system and it will also help to get detail about every aspect of drug

so now every time you see 3d chemical structure dnt forget to say thank you to Karplus and levitt 

Amino acid promising anti-diabetic effects

New experiments conducted by researchers from the University of Copenhagen (Denmark) show that the amino acid arginine - found in a wide variety of foods such as salmon, eggs and nuts - greatly improves the body's ability to metabolise glucose. Arginine stimulates a hormone linked to the treatment of type 2 diabetes, and works just as well as several established drugs on the market. The research findings have just been published in the scientific journal Endocrinology.
More than 371 million people worldwide suffer from diabetes, of whom 90% are affected by lifestyle-related diabetes mellitus type 2 (type 2 diabetes). In new experiments, researchers from the University of Copenhagen working in collaboration with a research group at the University of Cincinnati, USA, have demonstrated that the amino acid arginine improves glucose metabolism significantly in both lean (insulin-sensitive) and obese (insulin-resistant) mice.
"In fact, the amino acid is just as effective as several well-established drugs for type 2 diabetics," says postdoc Christoffer Clemmensen. He has conducted the new experiments based at Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen. He is currently conducting research at the Institute for Diabetes and Obesity at Helmholtz Zentrum München, the German Research Centre for Environmental Health in Munich.
To test the effect of the amino acid arginine, researchers subjected lean and obese animal models to a so-called glucose tolerance test, which measures the body’s ability to remove glucose from the blood over time.
"We have demonstrated that both lean and fat laboratory mice benefit considerably from arginine supplements. In fact, we improved glucose metabolism by as much as 40% in both groups. We can also see that arginine increases the body's production of glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), an intestinal hormone which plays an important role in regulating appetite and glucose metabolism, and which is therefore used in numerous drugs for treating type 2 diabetes," says Christoffer Clemmensen, and continues: "You cannot, of course, cure diabetes by eating unlimited quantities of arginine-rich almonds and hazelnuts. However, our findings indicate that diet-based interventions with arginine-containing foods can have a positive effect on how the body processes the food we eat."
The research findings were recently published in the American scientific journal Endocrinology under the heading Oral l-arginine Stimulates GLP-1 Secretion to Improve Glucose Tolerance in Male Mice.
Researchers have known for many years that the amino acid arginine is important for the body’s ability to secrete insulin. However, the latest findings show that it is an indirect process. The process is actually controlled by arginine’s ability to secrete the intestinal hormone GLP-1, which subsequently affects insulin secretion.
"Mice without GLP-1 receptors are not affected to the same extent by arginine. There is no perceptible improvement in glucose metabolism or insulin secretion, confirming our hypothesis of a close biological connection between GLP-1 and arginine," says Christoffer Clemmensen, who conducted the biological experiments in the USA using a special animal model where the receptor for GLP-1 is genetically inactivated.
The new findings provide optimism for better and more targeted drugs for treating type 2 diabetes; the outlook is long-term, but promising.
"This exciting result has raised several new questions which we want to investigate. Can other amino acids do what arginine does? Which intestinal mechanisms 'measure' arginine and lead to the release of GLP-1? Finally, there is the more long-term perspective - the question of whether the findings can be transferred from mice to humans and be used to design drugs that will benefit diabetes patients," says Professor Hans Bräuner-Osborne, who is continuing work on the project in the research group at the Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology at the University of Copenhagen.

GOVERNMENT TO START NEW SMS SERVICE TO CHECK THE PRICES OF GENERIC OPTIONS AVAILABLE FOR A BRANDED DRUG

Increasing activities of  black marketing and monopolies in drug market has finely alarmed the government and they are working on new service by which any one can get information about the generic options available for the drug and their prices . well this is a good news for the poor patients who often become prey of doctors by prescribing them drugs of high market rate 

What is the procedure 

its simple you just have to type the name of drug and send a sms to a number which will provide you the generic options available for that drug ................... as per rumors this job is given to NATIONAL PHARMACEUTICAL PRICING AUTHORITY 

Will it be helpful

In my point of view it will be helpful but there is an issue in my mind that drugs are not ordinary things a slight mistake can create a huge loss 

• it could happen that a person spell a drug wrong and gets an wrong alternative
• not only drug but dose also matters so may be somebody gets a wrong dose 
• in India everybody is a doctor himself and it will make more easy for these kind of persons to reach their quest to become doctor
• companies will try to lower their price as much as they can but this my affect there quality also

there are many positive points also 

• most of countrymen will be aware of generics
• at last doctors will be forced to prescribe the salt not the brand
• countrymen can reduce there cost of treatment 

Current status of the plan

The budget for this policy may be included in the budget of 2013-14 but still this is only a plan so it may be or may not be its totally up-to government

Plans to stop this project have also been started

There are many hurdles for this plan 

• according to law pharmacist can not dispense drugs other than the prescribed drugs to patients 
• Changing company may also affect the health of patients
• this policy needs a huge database the authority have to prepare a data base of about more than 90000 brands that are sold in country 

I hope that in future may be someday everybody has an option to chose the drug of his choice but not on the cost of health

waiting for your views ................................. 

The changed lifestyle... Is it really cool?

the eating habits and lifestyle of children are different from those of previous generations. Some people say this has had a negative effect on their health. To what extent do you agree or disagree with this opinion?

Recently, the eating habits and lifestyle of children has drastically changed from those of previous generation and is a major concern in many countries today causing negative effects primarily on health. Poor eating habits and sedentary lifestyle caused by the continuous evolution of high technology are some of the contributing factors on the increasing health problems worldwide. In this essay, I will discuss the above-mentioned issue and the danger it brings along.
With regards to eating habits, providing health and nutritious foods to the children are the parents' primary responsibility. In the case of children in the past for example, if only one parent is working to provide for the financial needs of the family, the other parent would have ample time to prepare and select appropriate nutritious foods foods belonging to the food groups go, glow and grow such as rice, meat, milk and vegetables and pay the required attention the children need. The parents act as a role model by showing to their kids, that they too, eat healthy foods and making sure they eat balanced diet. Also, they promote active lifestyle by spending a lot of time outdoors such as having picnics and engaging to sports as a form of exercise, this making their lives less sedentary.

However, living in a busy and highly sophisticated community greatly affects the interest of the children today, For instance, due to the fast-paced life, specifically in the key citied of the country, parents are too busy to prepare home-cooked foods. Fast food chains has been the solution to that problem. Parents resort to buying foods instead of personally cooking healthy meals at home. Although these establishments make our lives easier, what we are not aware of is that these unhealthy foods can raise the risk for cardiovascular diseases such as atherosclerosis, hypertension and stroke. Another, is the influence of technology. Devices such as cellular phones, TV, computer and other consoles has taken the attention of these youngsters instead of focusing on educational activities which can be a huge boost to their formative years. The children unknowingly becoming antisocial, develop violent behaviors and a sedentary lifestyle by engaging to these kind of activities, instead of developing their psychosocial and cognitive skills through frequent interaction with different people and utilizing their problem-solving strategies at an early age.

In conclusion, this essay explained how and why today's generation of food preference and lifestyle has changed. In my point of view, parents should inculcate to the minds of their children the habit of eating healthy foods and its benefits and organize activities to be done to stay healthy and fit.

How noble Prize changed medicine and your life

There are lots of reasoned we never think about. Thats fine if all you want to do is eat, sleep, drive and live. But its too difficult to control if your moto is very special and big or may be complex.

Special type of cells that work together to make something as complicated as, say, require more finer ability to control internal processes than one huge reaction could possibly provide. Evolution helped by solving this problem by creating a new class of life that regulate and control different sorts of actions in different sections of the cell — we call these cells as eukaryotes, and however it is fact that  we still don’t understand them very well even today. Thatz why for time being study require more affords in discovery.

Probably the biggest impediment to truly understanding eukaryotic cells, which encompass Fungi, plants and animals, is that their many compartments communicate and pass products around as needed. A protein might be first which made in the endoplasmic reticulum, move through some portion of the Golgi body apparatus, In this step the biochemists have long been vexed at the prospect of following a particular protein through all the intermediate given steps it takes in its lifetime — and again more importantly, at all the prospect of controlling those steps sequence.

The latest Nobel Prize in Medicine was given this month for several decades of work done on solving just this problem. The recipients collectively Gifted and prized a wealth of evidence for a new model of protein traffic inside a eukaryotic cell, this is the praise and appreciation to offer the team of scientists a way to predict and even influence that traffic. Their model proposes a lock-and-key model in which the first organ (a cellular compartment) buds off a bubble full of those protein(s), one studded with the particular molecular key. This protein transport the bubble, which is called as a vesicle, floats through the cell until and it jumps into the intended recipient organelle, where the receptor molecules captured hold of the vesicle and fuse itself with that, consuming its contents in it.



What does this mean for you? Probably Protein traffic is such a basic process in every eukaryotic plant and animal cells that it could be said to underlie virtually everythingthat they could do, but there is some diseases are linked to faulty protein traffic more directly in it. Certain types of diabetes, arise from an inability to understand and respond to signals about blood sugar levels in body. The winners’ past work has been used to help in diagnosis and treatment of several types of immune disorders and childhood epilepsy in patients.

With a detailed enough understanding the protein traffic, however, we could potentially cure all kinds of different diseases in human race. There’s increasing evidence that come in live is a trafficking problem which is the cause of many cases of Alzheimer’s disease and understanding accurately where that problem occurs is the first step to fixing it. If, say, a protein is missing an important modification on its way to a receptor site, we now know enough to significantly narrow the search and role of protein for culprits. Finally perhaps it’s a mutated signalling molecule that doesn’t allow to fuse with the proper target receptor and correcting the protein.

There is very different and every advance study in neurology relies at least somewhat on this work. Neurons in brain release and take up neurotransmitters by axons with very similar processes, neuron humoral transmission sending vesicles two and fro.  Though this time the bubbles of ferry proteins between two cells rather than within it. You can understand the vesicle traffic of protein for the explosion of psycho-active drugs in the past twenty years or so like Narcotics. Again, understanding the complex processes that modulates life is the tough part; once understanding is in sequence, manipulating and rearranging those processes is what we’re best at.

That’s why this research received the honour of Nobel Prize: after all these years, This study allows progress in fields all over biology, from epilepsy to schizophrenia to Viagra and even narcotics. It’s a process that allowed life to give rise to the amazing diversity which help in evolution process that we see today. We’re just now in frame of beginning to grasp how it works.