I made only necessary spelling, grammar, punctuation and AP-style corrections while preserving the writer’s wording and argument.
There’s never a good time to be diagnosed with cancer. But for the millions of Americans who’ll receive that diagnosis this year, their odds of beating the disease have never been better.
Consider how over 99% of prostate cancer patients diagnosed between 2005 and 2014 were still alive a decade later, largely thanks to new and improved medicines. By contrast, only 56% of men diagnosed a generation earlier, from 1975 to 1984, lived more than a decade.
Unfortunately, future progress is now in jeopardy — because policymakers are considering weakening the patent rights that make investment in lifesaving medical research possible.
Biotech research is staggeringly expensive and time-consuming, and it is overwhelmingly financed by the private sector. Bringing a medicine to market typically takes more than a decade and over $2.5 billion.
Biotech companies would never be able to justify those risks if their rivals could immediately copy any successful drugs. Patents give inventors a time-limited exclusive right to their innovation, after which others can copy that work without bearing the expense of research and development.
Crucially, patents also incentivize companies to continue improving medicines even after the initial FDA approval.
But some activist groups, such as the Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge (I-MAK), have convinced lawmakers that companies are gaming the patent system. They claim that companies are patenting many different aspects of their medicines to construct “patent thickets” that unfairly prevent generic competition for longer than Congress ever intended.
These groups are misrepresenting how the patent system actually works.
Medicines aren’t the result of a single eureka moment. A single therapy may involve separate discoveries in formulation, delivery mechanisms, manufacturing processes, dosing or new therapeutic uses. So long as each discovery is truly novel, useful and nonobvious, it can qualify for its own patent.
