Authors

Nicholson Price is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. Previously, he taught law at the University of New Hampshire. He holds a PhD in Biological Sciences and a JD, both from Columbia, and an AB from Harvard. He clerked for Judge Carlos T. Bea on the Ninth Circuit, and was then appointed as an Academic Fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard. Nicholson teaches patents and health law and studies life science innovation, including big data and artificial intelligence in medicine. He recommends reading Bujold, Jemisin, and Older. His work has appeared in Nature, Science, Nature Biotechnology, the Michigan Law Review, and elsewhere. Nicholson is cofounder of Regulation and Innovation in the Biosciences, co-chair of the Junior IP Scholars Association, and a Core Partner at the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Advanced Studies in Biomedical Innovation Law.
concept of artificial intelligence, human brain with machinery

Four Roles for Artificial Intelligence in the Medical System

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How will artificial intelligence (AI) change medicine?

AI, powered by “big data” in health, promises to transform medical practice, but specifics remain inchoate.  Reports that AI performs certain tasks at the level of specialists stoke worries that AI will “replace” physicians.  These worries are probably overblown; AI is unlikely to replace many physicians in the foreseeable future.  A more productive set of questions considers how AI and physicians should interact, including how AI can improve the care physicians deliver, how AI can best enable physicians to focus on the patient relationship, and how physicians should review the recommendations and predictions of AI.  Answering those questions requires clarity about the larger function of AI: not just what tasks AI can do or how it can do them, but what role it will play in the context of physicians, other patients, and providers within the overall medical system.

Medical AI can improve care for patients and improve the practice of medicine for providers—as long as its development is supported by an understanding of what role it can and should play.

Four different roles each have the possibility to be transformative for providers and patients: AI can push the frontiers of medicine; it can replicate and democratize medical expertise; it can automate medical drudgery; and it can allocate medical resources.

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Drug Pricing, Shame, and Shortages

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By Nicholson Price

Drug prices have been making waves in the news recently.  The most recent case is the huge price hikes of the EpiPen, which provides potentially life-saving automatic epinephrine injections to those with severe allergies.  Mylan, which makes the EpiPen, has raised its price some 450% over the last several years.  The EpiPen is a particularly problematic—and media-friendly—story because the emblematic use case is the kid in school who can’t breathe because she came into contact with peanuts.  Jacking up the price on something that’s not optional—for parents and for schools—seems heartless.  Thoughtful pieces have pointed out how the EpiPen price increases demonstrate problems with our health care system and drug/device approval system in general.

Other big recent cases that have hit the news include huge increases in the price of insulin, and, of course, Turing Pharmaceuticals’/Martin Shkreli’s ~5000% price hike on the drug Daraprim.  The EpiPen and Daraprim are especially notable because patents mostly aren’t involved—the effective monopoly appears to come from the delay or challenge in getting generic products approved by FDA (although the EpiPen itself also seems tough to make).  And, of course, drug prices aren’t regulated in the US the way they are in much of the world.

These stories seem crazy, cruel, and fascinating.  And they raise (for me, anyway) the question: what’s changed?  This seems like a relatively new phenomenon.  But FDA’s had a backlog for a while, and drug prices have long been unregulated. Read More

The 21st Century Cures Act, HIPAA, Big Data, and Medical Research

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By Nicholson Price

The 21st Century Cures Act is a big deal; the House passed it handily, and we’re still waiting to see what the Senate does.  A lot has been written about what it does in terms of changing FDA review processes, and a fair bit about the lovely increase in funding for NIH (see Rachel Sachs’ blog posts here, here, and here).  These are tremendously important.

But another provision in the bill has been getting much less play: the way it changes HIPAA to enable large-scale research, which is also a big deal all by itself. Read More

#BELHP2014 Panel 3, Behavioral Economics and Health Care Costs

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By Nicholson Price

[Ed. Note: On Friday, May 2 and Saturday, May 3, 2014, the Petrie-Flom Center hosted its 2014 annual conference: “Behavioral Economics, Law, and Health Policy.”  This is an installment in our series of live blog posts from the event; video will be available later in the summer on our website.]

Our third panel, moderated by PFC Academic Fellow Matthew Lawrence, addresses the use of behavioral economics techniques to control health care costs.  Speakers are Christopher T. Robertson, Brigitte Madrian, Ameet Sarpatwari, Anupam Jena, and Jim Hawkins.  (Many projects are co-authored, but I’m only listing the presenters here)

The first speaker is Professor Christopher T. Robertson, coming from Arizona Law but visiting Harvard and the PFC this year, speaking on Cost-Sharing as Choice Architecture.  He starts by talking about the cost side of cost sharing, which we know works in reducing consumption from empirical evidence; from the RAND study, it reduced use without reducing health.  More recent studies also confirm this.  But cost sharing presents four problems:

  1. Underinsurance relative to ability to pay
  2. Indiscriminate reductions in health care (more of an ax than a scalpel)
  3. An unfair tax on sickness (more tentative if we can solve the first two)
  4. The burden of deciding.

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Liveblog of 4/2 panel on Hot Topics in European Bio-Patent Law, Part IV

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By Nicholson Price

Finishing up the event today is Tom Kowalski from Vedder Price, giving a US perspective on section 101 on patentable subject matter.  This post will encompass his presentation and general questions afterward.

Kowalski starts with a brief review of patentable subject matter, and states his view that after Prometheus and Myriad, “the fabric of the patent system has been torn.”  His view is that isolated DNA is a separate chemical entity, and that the Supreme Court simply got it wrong.  Read More

Liveblog of 4/2 panel in European Bio-patent Law, Part III

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By Nicholson Price

Third up is Dr. Maaike van der Kooij, discussing medical use claims at the EPO.

In general, methods of medical treatment aren’t patentable under Art. 53(c) of the EPC, but the way around is to claim a relevant product either for medical use (if the substance is known but not medically used (Art. 54(4)) or for a specific medical use (Art. 54(5)).  (From my point of view, this seems like another way that the EPO is trying to address its innovation mandate by working around what appears to be pretty clear language in the EPC, a pattern which we certainly see in the US in both PTO and Federal Circuit practice). Read More

Liveblog of 4/2 panel on Hot Topics in European Bio-Patent Law, Part II

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By Nicholson Price

Next up is Dr. Anja Schmitt, comparing Myriad and Mayo to EPO practice, and describing gene patents and diagnostic method patents in the EPO.

Human gene patents

The basic question of human gene patents–as will be familiar to those who followed the Myriad litigation–is whether isolated DNA is a product of nature/mere discovery, or a man-made product with technical character.  In the Myriad case, claims covered isolated DNAs for the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes which are useful for identifying a predisposition to breast cancer.

At the EPO, on the other hand–using the same sources of law as Dr. Nichogiannopoulou mentioned before–genes are patentable as long as they disclose the industrial applicability and the function of the gene and/or its encoded protein. Read More

Liveblog of 4/2 panel on Hot Topics in European Bio-Patent Law, Part I

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By Nicholson Price

I’ll be liveblogging today’s panel on Hot Topics in European Bio-Patent Law (co-sponsored by the Broad Institute), with several guest speakers from the European Patent Office (EPO).

Ben Roin, Heiken Assistant Professor of Patent Law here at HLS, is moderating.  Speakers will be Dr. Aliki Nichogiannopoulou on stem cells, and Dr. Anja Schmitt on gene patents, Dr. Maiake van der Kooij, all of the EPO, followed by Tom Kowalski of VedderPrice.

Dr. Nichogiannopolou begins by talking about stem cells, and opens with a few background points about the EPO.  The agency has its own implementing legislation separate from the EU, and includes 38 member states – 10 more than the EU itself, including industry-important Switzerland.  The EPO supports innovation, competitiveness, and economic growth for the benefits of European citizens, and has the mandate to grant European patents for inventions. Read More

More on taxing egg “donation” payments

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By Nicholson Price

Dov Fox had a terrific post about taxes on compensation for those who donate eggs and sperm a few weeks ago in reaction to Perez v. Commissioner.  I don’t have any particularly new thoughts on this area, but for those of you who haven’t already seen it, I wanted to share the excellent mini-symposium that recently concluded over on the Faculty Lounge on this topic.  Kim Krawiec organized, and there’s a series of great posts by several scholars, pointing out, among other things, the strangeness of the fact that there’s still quite a lot of uncertainty about these issues, even though they’ve been around for a while and are not particularly rare.  In any case, it’s very much worth reading, even for those who aren’t normally tax wonks.

FSMA Conference Part 2: FSMA and Risk Regulation Strategy

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[Ed. Note: On Friday, the Petrie-Flom Center, the Food Law and Policy Clinic (a division of the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation), the Food Law Lab, and the Harvard Food Law Society (with support from the Top University Strategic Alliance and the Dean’s Office at Harvard Law School) co-sponsored a conference at HLS called “New Directions for Food Safety: The Food Safety Modernization Act and Beyond.”  This week, we will be sharing a series of blog posts from the event, and video will follow shortly.]

After Peter Hutt’s teriffic keynote speech, our first panel addresses the Food Safety Modernization Act and risk regulation strategies.  The speakers are Professor Jake Gersen of Harvard Law School, Director of the Food Law Lab, and Professor Michael Roberts, Founding Executive Director of UCLA Law School’s Resnick Center on Food Law and Policy. Read More