Even as pharma companies have yet to feel the full effects of the Inflation Reduction Act, Senate lawmakers have turned their attention to another facet of drug pricing with a bill meant to crack down on the industry's aggressive patenting practices.
Thursday, the Senate unanimously the bipartisan Affordable Prescriptions for Patients Act, which looks to limit the number of patents drugmakers can assert in litigation on individual biological products. The bill aims to fight “patent thicketing,” a tactic the branded drug industry uses to delay or thwart competition.
Patent thicketing occurs when drug companies stack secondary drug patents to create a complex web of intellectual property that's hard for generic or biosimilars developers to navigate. AbbVie, for example, was able to keep its top-selling immunology drug Humira from U.S. competition for two decades by leveraging a web of 250 patents, patient access group Patients for Affordable Drugs Now (P4ADNow) said in a press release.
"This long-overdue legislation would promote competition and lower prices for patients without standing in the way of innovation, and I urge my colleagues in the House to pass it as soon as possible," bill sponsor Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said in a statement.
Reining in patent thickets would create $1.8 billion in taxpayer savings over the span of a decade, the Congressional Budget Office has forecast.
Industry trade group The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) responded that it has “always supported the full lifecycle of medicines—from innovation to generic and biosimilar uptake,” but the group has “concerns with Congress prohibiting innovators from enforcing lawfully granted patents,” a spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
The bill has been tweaked a bit since its initial proposal. The original version also targeted “product hopping,” a term for when a drugmaker pushes patients toward a follow-up product as the original version of the drug heads toward the patent cliff. Cornyn and Blumenthal "remain committed" to addressing that practice as well, the pair said in a statement.