Up­dat­ed: Drug­mak­ers ben­e­fit 'sub­stan­tial­ly' from sec­ondary patents on in­halers — study

When William Feld­man was a fel­low in pul­monary and crit­i­cal care at Brigham and Women’s Hos­pi­tal in Boston, he no­ticed that some pa­tients couldn’t af­ford their brand-name in­halers.

On Tues­day, he and a team of re­searchers pub­lished ev­i­dence sug­gest­ing that drug­mak­ers are ben­e­fit­ing “sub­stan­tial­ly” from staving off gener­ic com­pe­ti­tion, even af­ter their pri­ma­ry patents have ex­pired.

“The patent and reg­u­la­to­ry sys­tem in the Unit­ed States should be re­ward­ing mean­ing­ful clin­i­cal in­no­va­tion — big ther­a­peu­tic break­throughs,” said Feld­man, now an as­so­ciate physi­cian at Brigham. “This pa­per shows how lu­cra­tive it can be for man­u­fac­tur­ers of in­halers and oth­er prod­ucts to con­tin­ue to earn high rev­enue on mol­e­cules that were de­vel­oped, in some in­stances, decades ago.”

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