Opinion | Save America’s Patent System (original) (raw)
Opinion|Save America’s Patent System
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/16/opinion/patents-reform-drug-prices.html
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The Editorial Board
April 16, 2022
Credit...Illustration by Rebecca Chew/The New York Times; photographs by Yevgen Romanenko, moi/amanaimagesRF, Westend61 and Marie Hickman, via Getty Images
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The injector pen is not, by any stretch, a new invention. Drugmakers of every ilk have been using it for decades to deliver all sorts of crucial medications into the bloodstream. By adding this old technology to its insulin drug, Glargine, however, the pharmaceutical giant Sanofi was nonetheless able to secure additional patents for a lucrative product. The drug’s existing patents were expiring, and new ones enabled the company to maintain its monopoly — and the bounty that goes with it — much longer. But for the patients who depend on this life-sustaining drug? Too many are still struggling to afford it.
Sanofi is not alone, of course. Other drugmakers have patented scores of uninspiring tweaks to their existing products: making a tablet instead of a pill, changing the dose, adding a flavor. When it comes to protecting a drug monopoly, it seems no modification is too small.
Drugmakers for decades have argued that patents are essential to American innovation. For all that lip service to medical advancement, though, a recent investigation by the House Oversight Committee concluded that market share is more likely the point. Twelve of the drugs that Medicare spends the most on are protected by more than 600 patents in total, according to the committee. Many of those patents contain little that’s truly new. But the thickets they create have the potential to extend product monopolies for decades. In so doing, they promise to add billions to the nation’s soaring health care costs — and to pharmaceutical coffers.
And for all the hand-wringing over how to lower prescription drug costs in recent years, little has been said about the patent system or its many failings. Put simply: The United States Patent and Trademark Office is in dire need of reform.
The agency was created more than two centuries ago for the express purpose of protecting and promoting innovation. For most of the ensuing decades, it has stood as a beacon of American ingenuity. But critics say that by the time the office issued its 11 millionth patent last year, it had long since devolved into a backwater office that large corporations game, politicians ignore and average citizens are wholly excluded from. As a result, not only is legal trickery rewarded and the public’s interest overlooked, but also innovation — the very thing that patents were meant to foster — is undermined.
The trouble goes well beyond prescription drugs. “The patent office holds sway over huge swaths of the U.S. economy,” said Priti Krishtel, an attorney and co-founder of the Initiative for Medicines, Access and Knowledge, a nonprofit dedicated to patent system reform. “It has the power to shape markets, and just about every industry you can think of, from agriculture to technology, is impacted by its shortcomings.”
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