Partner Heather Petruzzi, Counsel Jerry Salvatore and Senior Associate Patrick Nyman authored an article published in the American Bar Association’s Landslide Magazine about the importance of patents, recent governmental actions that weaken pharmaceutical patents and guiding principles for what change could look like, among other topics.
Excerpt: “Generic drug companies (or biosimilar companies) sell products at substantially reduced costs, but they also have reduced R&D costs because they rely on prior clinical trials. And the trade-off is allowing the brand drug an exclusivity period. This is how the patent system in the pharmaceutical industry is supposed to work: provide a limited period of exclusivity to the newest innovations to reward past research and fund existing and future R&D, and then open the field to low-cost generics for all time. To take just one example, in 2011 Lipitor was a blockbuster drug that was the best-selling drug of all time, and its active ingredient (atorvastatin) remains the most prescribed drug today.”
