FTC challenges 'junk' patents held by 10 drugmakers, incl Novo Nordisk's Ozempic

The cost of healthcare should trend down as more and more drugs enter the public domain and generics become available. However this clearly isn't happening.

It is also interesting when does the social benefit of a drug outweigh the benefit of creating an 'incentive' for drug companies. If GLP-1 drugs are worthy of the hype, we're basically talking about 20 years of unneeded suffering and trillions of dollars of avoidable damage to society all to give a drug company a limited monopoloy. At a certain point the US should just eminent domain the patent, give them some reasonable compensation, and make the drug broadly available to all Americans similar to COVID vaccines.

Semaglutide was invented before 2008. Its patent expires in a few years.

It takes a long time to get drugs through trials and get the FDA to approve drugs for new uses. Pharmaceutical companies spend billions on drugs that never make it through trials. If you don’t enforce their patents, companies won’t make new drugs.

I wonder if a system like that could work.

SpaceX and numerous other companies were able to draw in billions of dollars of funding for R&D to chase after US Government contracts that could only be won by proving massive technological feats (reusable rockets, etc).

Hypothetically, it seems we could do something similar for drugs. Instead of "If you make a medicine that works, you get a monopoly to sell it for X years" it could just be "If you make a medicine that works, you get a check for $X, and then the drug is immediately generic".

The regulations are different. The FDA only gets in trouble if they approve a drug that turns out to be harmful, not if they fail to approve (or delay approving) a beneficial drug. On net, the FDA has caused far more harm than they’ve prevented. eg: Banning the importation of infant formula from the EU, or delaying the approval of new beta blockers by a decade.

Overseas the patent expires in 2026. I the USA, it will be "no later than" 2031.