Why Weakening Patent Protection Is Not in the Public's Best Interest
The price of branded drugs in the United States has been and continues to be a hot topic. While various causes have been alleged, recent attention has focused heavily on the U.S. patent system. Lawmakers, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and even the former president have called for or sought to push through substantial changes to the patent system that weaken pharmaceutical patents. Blaming the patent system, however, overstates the impact patents have on drug prices. The correlation between the number of pharmaceutical patents associated with a product and competition is far from clear (as even the USPTO has found1 ), and by many metrics the patent system is working as intended. Yet many proposed "solutions" have treated patents as an easy fix without considering downstream ramifications.
This article discusses the importance of patents, the current frameworks in which generic and biosimilar manufacturers may rely on the innovator's (e.g., branded company's) research and development (R&D) to market their own products, recent governmental actions to weaken pharmaceutical patents, and why blaming patents for high drug prices oversimplifies a complex system and ignores the need to incentivize innovation. Finally, this article offers a few guiding principles for what change could look like.
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Originally published by the American Bar Association's Landslide Magazine
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