How a Drug Company Made $114B by Gaming the U.S. Patent System | Hacker News Reader

How a Drug Company Made $114B by Gaming the U.S. Patent System

nytimes.com

47 pointsctoth29 comments

If anyone ever wonders what true evil looks like, just read this article.

These articles just make me feel so angry! Charging retired people $80K/year is no different than mugging them.

*repeatedly

repeatedly being mugged is still a poor analogy that understates how grim the situation is. muggers have competitors who might offer the victim a better deal. in this case there are no competitors. the victims return to be mugged again and again, fully aware what is happening.

Eminent Domain. The US government should nationalize these drugs and pay a fair price.

If that doesn't work, tax the rich

unfortunately, it's the rich making the tax laws.

Which of these is least likely?

It’s a very tough call.

Porque no los dos?

The US taxpayer (aka Medicare) is picking up that tab.

Seems like anti-trust could be used to punish this behavior? It's clearly anti-competitive with negative consumer impact. Even the post-Bork shambles of antitrust in the US seems like it should be up to the task.

The U.S. Constitution authorizes Congress to grant temporary monopolies "for limited Times to Authors and Inventors" in order to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." So any patents that extend beyond the limited times needed to incentivize progress would seem to be unconstitutional.

Congress controls all the levers here. They need to reign in this patent abuse. Instead they've allowed the big pharmaceutical companies to use a steady stream of minor tweaks to existing patents to sue their competition into oblivion.

TL;DR: AbbVie filed hundreds of patents on Humira, most after the drug was already on the market, covering very specific scenarios, which gave them ammo to keep the drug away from generics/biosimilars for a longer period of time.

https://archive.is/OvfTj

How is the NYTimes claiming “minimal changes” when the US patent office approved all of the patents?

I mean they either meet the threshold for a patent or not?

And Humira is one of the first anti-TNF drugs out there and has been approved for over a dozen different diseases (each one supported by the clinical trial the company ran).

I’m not surprised there are so many parents or they ran for so long since the runway for the drug has been spectacular.

What's really needed is for there to be only one patent allowed per compound approved as a pharmaceutical.

It would be better if there were no additional patents on expanded scope of treatments or alternative dosage forms.

So the patent covering using the compound for treatment always expires at the soonest possible time after filing, and the most predictable time.

And allow only one additional patent per innovative technique of manufacturing the compound.

Having hundreds of patents to encumber a single compound for excessive decades is dystopian in shkreli-ish proportions.

Limiting it to one patent sounds like a great way for companies to just abandon development.

Why would you spend hundreds of millions on clinical trials if you can't recoup the cost?

Pharma already recoups the cost before the first patent expires.

And long ago abandoned development when this criteria is not likely to be met.

You’re ignoring the drugs that never come to market because costs can’t be recouped.

And no, many drugs never recoup costs before the patent runs out. Even the ones that make it to market.

There are lots of problems with the USPTO, this is one of them.

On the one hand its great if you have strong IP protection, on the other you (as in the US taxpayer and medical insurance subscriber) ends up paying eye-watering sums for medicines long after the rest of the world has moved on to generics.

This reminds me of why the US medical system will never be reformed in meaningful ways: there's too much money to be made with the status quo.

Is anyone aware of efforts to change laws or regulations that have a non-negligible chance of succeeding, and could restrict the opportunity for this kind of corporate misbehavior in future?

(we can imagine many wildly non-incremental changes, e.g. imagine if the US adopted a UK style NHS! but it's not obvious how one could incrementally get there from the starting point)

Considering the anti consumer outcomes existing antitrust would be enough. If only it were actually enforced. More unenforced legislation won't help.

Just try suggesting that drug patent monopolies be shortened from 20 to 10 years. Watch how much screaming and hand-wringing ensues.

Well those 20 years are where they make all the money - there is a lot of reason to think that they would just double prices if you were to cut that period in half. Given that Humira has made life livable for millions of people with RA, Crohn's and a bunch of other really terrible problems I'd argue it was worth every cent of the $200 billion in sales (we probably spent the same amount on annual UN fees and diplomats over the same time period). I think something should be done about this patent gamesmanship but I find it hard to see them as evil when they have a patient assistance program that covers the overwhelming majority of the population.

The department of state and foreign affairs costs about $55b a year so we spend about five times more a year on diplomats than Humira.

Now exactly why you think it’s reasonable for the country to spend 1/5th of what it costs to run the entirety of foreign diplomacy for the biggest superpower on earth on only a single drug I’m not completely sure.

Because the drug is highly effective and has improved the lives of millions of people? There is a reason Medicare patients are willing to spend 5 grand a year on it. What has the State Department done for me lately?

Look to be fair, a majority of a drug's time under patent will be during development, when they can't make any revenue. It's even been argued that the high cost of new medication is (partially) because they only have a short period of time to actually sell it while under patent (it takes roughly 8-15 years to bring a drug to market).

I personally believe that while these abuses of the system absolutely should be accounted for, reducing the period of patent to 10 years won't help anything.

“We price our goods to the value they provide” for things like basic healthcare is price gouging. It’s no different whether your some asshole horsing toilet paper or a multibillion dollar corporation who has bribed half of congress.

…

Oh wait the bribery worked and is now legal? “Cool”

Another example of patents and regulations ruining lives.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com