Posts Tagged: "drug prices"

Pandemic Response Reauthorization Bill Advances Out of Senate HELP Committee with Anti-Patent Provisions Intact

On Thursday morning, the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP) held a legislative markup hearing to debate amendments to S. 2333, the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness and Response Act (PAHPARA), the reauthorization bill to extend the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA). If enacted as currently drafted, PAHPARA would direct federal agencies to study alternative models for funding biomedical research, including prize systems that have been routinely rejected as a viable model by pro-innovation advocates.

Price Controls and Compulsory Licensing Reduce Patient’s Healthcare Options

Once we go down a path of government price controls and compulsory licensing we will have foregone opportunities for other, more rational policy choices and will soon find ourselves in a race to the bottom. Of course, making prescription drugs more affordable must be an important, shared goal. But the solutions we pursue cannot risk choking off America’s innovative ecosystem that leads the world in discovering new cures and treatments. As Nobel laureate and NIH Director Harold Varmus said in 1995, one must first have a new drug to price before one can worry about how to price it.  Letting our federal government import foreign price controls and expropriate patents is not the way to go about it.

Reflections on Drug Patents and the High Cost of Healthcare

The Hatch-Waxman Act and the Biologic Price Competition and Innovation Act are both forged from a noble ideal, grounded in a commitment to a robust and earnest patent system that rewards real innovation… By the power vested in them by specially-reserved patent laws, drug patents are a patent species of their own universe. They can have the economic power of nuclear warheads, in an industry built on an exclusivity model worth hundreds of billions of dollars, per year. We simply cannot afford to fill the silos of those warheads with patent waste that does not innovate or improve upon anything, but which can wreak economic and social havoc, while feeding the general public’s perception that all patents stink.

Drug-Patent Abuse and the High Cost of Healthcare: Case of the Double-Half Dose-Time Injection

Ever since the Supreme Court decided KSR v. Teleflex, it has been appropriate to reject a patent claim because it was obvious to try. If twice the dose intravenously, half as often works, why wouldn’t the highly-educated person of skill in the art – who would hold an M.D. or Ph.D. level education with years of experience – not be tempted to try the same thing subcutaneously? And if they do try it and the results are as expected that should mean, under KSR, that the claimed invention is obvious. Somehow in the pharmaceutical arts KSR does not get applied that way.

To Make Healthcare More Affordable, Fight Drug Patent Abuse with a Fury

If a drug company plants a more than 100-patent thicket to protect market exclusivity, then it had better be able to justify why it should deserve the cumulative protection of patent term. Yes, the patent on the original formulation will fall into the public domain and may be capable of being made by generics long before the last of the patents expire, but often-times those follow on “innovations” are the kind of trivial advances that ordinarily shouldn’t support a fresh patent.