ACTA promotes medical research  Companies that accept huge research costs – such as the pharmaceutical industries – need the surety of knowing that they will have some payback for that research. Without that there is little point in them undertaking the research in the first place and medical science will suffer.  It’s easy to say that manufacturing a pill only costs two cents – the reality is that a trial alone can cost upwards of $100m with the whole research and development per approved drug costing billions. [i] The framework  for doing that is one that requires a profit for investors and security for researchers.  Allowing for generic medicines to undermine that end point profit discourages the necessary blue-sky thinking and ground-breaking research as they’re risky and may not see a financial return. As a result, those medicines that are proven ‘sellers’ need to make the profit for the long-term investment that will be required for cures for cancer, AIDS and other global killers. Stopping pharmaceutical companies from making a healthy profit on established antibiotics and similar medicines means that they then don’t have the financial muscle to be able to fund the long development and large amount of research necessary to create the drugs of the future. If they then believe those drugs will quickly be recreated and turned into generics they will give up researching entirely.  [i] Herper, Matthew, ‘The Truly Staggering Cost of Inventing New Drugs’, Forbes, 10 February 2012.