RandyMarch13 - forgive me for not being sure whether, these statements are due to a lack of understanding or it's an attempt to be deliberately provocative, or whether you are just trying out new jokes. So I'm just going to put some obvious and basic propositions forward. I do this because you are effectively suggesting that in a matter of days, Mesoblast will go out of business because everybody else would be producing MSCs and profiting from MSB's research and development over more than a decade. The biotech industry, past this point, is non-viable on your view of the world, for why would anyone else go through another decade of research and development, tapping its loyal shareholders for cash along the way.
Just reflect on that for a moment, and it will be patently (and yes, that's my play on words) obvious how ridiculous that is. And what you think is "truth over facts" has already been proven wrong by JCR's productions and use of MSC's in Japan over the last 3-4 years, they didn't need to pay a single cent in royalties to MSB.
The statement "..there's no approved treatment for treating coronavirus?" is so fundamentally flawed it almost doesn't need answering. When you sat at your laptop/printer/scanner and came up with a smart workaround to get something printed or scanned or sent, did you patent it?
When the doctors in Italy, Spain, Mt Sinai, a few weeks into the pandemic worked out that patients did better when they lay on their stomach, and that reducing the strength of the oxygen ventilation would produce less lung scarring, and that taking remdesivir or dexamethasone in certain doses, or at certain stages or combinations, or not at all, did they patent that? These are all improved treatments for coronavirus amending the Standard of Care all the time and reducing the mortality rate. Have you found any patents for it, or is this all easily discoverable over the internet after a few Google searches? While we're there, what about patenting a prevention? Did anyone patent putting on masks or washing hands? Two decades ago, when doctors worked out the main source of transmission of HIV amongst gay men, did they patent that information about prevention? As the Presidential candidate would say "C'mon Man".
That's the long, self-evident, obvious answer. The short answer of course is patents don't relate to an approved treatment for treating coronavirus. It is the FDA that approves that treatment (is this impending FDA approval what you're really trying to focus people's insecurity around?). And besides, the "treatment" in this instance, somewhat surprisingly, is called "intravenous injection". Look it up, it's been around for awhile, and no-one that I'm aware has paid any royalty for doing IV, other than buying the equipment needed to do an IV injection.
There's another answer here, and that is patents primarily do not attach to treatments but to products (including patents for the production process), and they are owned by people or commercial entities who have the legal, enforceable right to contract for its production (ie Lonza) and licence its use by way of a royalty, and to come to future agreements with big pharma and governments about its production, distribution, use and royalties.
Maybe you have tripped onto an issue that most of us have some contact with over the pharmacy counter, being when the pharmacist says: "Do you want to pay mega-bucks for the original XX drug, or a generic YY drug at a fraction of the cost? It works the same, I assure you." Two answers there, the primary one being that generics are only permitted to enter the market when the original patent has lapsed (will leave you to research the MESO website to find out for yourself when MSB's patents expire). Secondly, this isn't a drug compound that you just put under a microscope and copy away. Production by Lonza is extremely complicated and inextricably linked to the quality of the product and its efficacy. Here's another credible site about production of generics, pot patent expiry, for you to do some reading (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5384269/ ).
Have fun and stay safe.
MSB Price at posting:
$5.11 Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
(20min delay)