By Matt Bauer
The changing landscape of the life sciences industry relies more and more on a form of intellectual property protection called trade secrets to safeguard mechanisms of manufacturing and process knowledge not always included within life science patents.
To the public, this means the methods of production for life saving therapeutics may be kept indefinitely in the hands a single company, never to enter the public domain.
By Gregory Curfman
Three new developments — two based on litigation and one based on a federal statute — may have significant effects on pharmaceutical manufacturers’ use of patents to fend off competition and maintain high prices for therapeutic monoclonal antibodies.
Highly specific monoclonal antibodies have played an increasingly important role as precision therapies for a growing number of diseases, including malignant, cardiovascular, and inflammatory conditions. As therapies derived from research and development, therapeutic monoclonal antibodies may be — and usually are — patented, providing manufacturers with protection from competition and the prospect of high revenues.
By Laura Karas
Are manufacturing method patents — patents not on a pharmaceutical drug itself, but on a method of production of a drug — warranted intellectual property protections, or groundless obstacles to competition?
Patents protect and reward innovation by permitting the patent-holder the exclusive right to make, use, and sell the invention for a twenty-year period. Pharmaceutical companies have attracted scrutiny, criticism, and legal challenges for amassing large numbers of patents on pharmaceutical drugs, especially high-priced and high revenue-earning drugs.
Here I explore the topic of pharmaceutical patents on methods of production and translate into layman’s terms some thought-provoking recent scholarship by innovation scholars W. Nicholson Price and Arti Rai.
By Laura Karas
In June 2020, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois dismissed state and federal antitrust claims against AbbVie, maker of Humira (adalimumab), for accruing more than 130 patents on the top-selling drug and asserting allegedly unmeritorious patent infringement claims against makers of adalimumab biosimilars. AbbVie then settled the patent infringement litigation by entering into agreements with eight drug makers to allow adalimumab biosimilars to enter the U.S. market in 2023 and the European market in 2018.
In my last post, I discussed the district court’s memorandum opinion finding that “the vast majority” of AbbVie’s conduct was not “objectively baseless petitioning” and was therefore immunized under the Noerr-Pennington doctrine. In this post, I explore several problematic aspects of the court’s reasoning for rejecting the claims of pay-for-delay and market allocation.
By Laura Karas
Now that 2020 has come to a close, it’s worth taking stock of the progress the United States has made during the last year with respect to biosimilars, pharmaceutical therapies that are highly similar to a reference biologic product and possess no clinically meaningful differences.
By Ameet Sarpatwari, Charlie Lee, Frazer Tessema, and Aaron S. Kesselheim
Each month, members of the Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL) review the peer-reviewed medical literature to identify interesting empirical studies, policy analyses, and editorials on health law and policy issues relevant to current or potential future work in the Division.
Below are the abstracts/summaries for papers identified from the month of July. The selections feature topics ranging from the price increases of protected-class drugs in Medicare Part D, to the impact of price regulation on the availability of new drugs in Germany, to the association between FDA advisory committee recommendations and agency actions. A full posting of abstracts/summaries of these articles may be found on our website.