As the may­or of New York City, Mike Bloomberg had a few mod­est ideas about low­er­ing pre­scrip­tion drug prices in the Big Ap­ple that gained lit­tle trac­tion. Now on the cam­paign trail on a faint hope of clinch­ing the De­mo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion, the bil­lion­aire has some big­ger plans — in­clud­ing one that would al­ter the patent sys­tem cen­tral to the bio­phar­ma busi­ness.

In a bare­bones drug pric­ing plan post­ed on Mon­day, Bloomberg came out blast­ing Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump for fail­ing to de­liv­er his promise to low­er drug prices, and then mak­ing mis­lead­ing claims about them. The price of over 3,000 drugs still in­creased at a rate five times high­er than in­fla­tion in the first six months of 2019, he wrote.

So how will he fix it? Bloomberg lists a few wide­ly dis­cussed pol­i­cy pro­pos­als, in­clud­ing au­tho­riz­ing Medicare to ne­go­ti­ate drug prices (a key goal of Nan­cy Pelosi’s re­cent­ly passed House bill), al­low­ing Amer­i­cans to buy med­i­cine from oth­er coun­tries (some­thing the HHS has re­leased a plan on), and cap­ping out-of-pock­et costs for Medicare ben­e­fi­cia­ries.

He al­so pledged to elim­i­nate “pay­offs” — pre­sum­ably the arrange­ment com­mon­ly known as re­bates — from drug­mak­ers to phar­ma­cy ben­e­fit man­agers. The White House had set out to do the same but changed course to kill re­bate re­form back in Ju­ly.

But Bloomberg’s most eye-catch­ing pro­pos­al is this: “Bring gener­ic drugs to the mar­ket faster by lim­it­ing brand-name drug mak­ers to one patent that lasts 20 years.”

Ac­cel­er­at­ing the speed of gener­ics ap­proval had been a key goal for for­mer FDA Com­mis­sion­er Scott Got­tlieb, who called out brand­ed drug­mak­ers for “shenani­gans” to de­lay gener­ic drug com­pe­ti­tion. Dur­ing his tenure, Got­tlieb al­so im­ple­ment­ed new poli­cies aimed at bar­ring phar­ma from ex­ploit­ing REMS re­quire­ments for their ben­e­fit.

But chang­ing patent and IP laws could be a dras­tic ex­pan­sion of that ef­fort. Ab­b­Vie has re­port­ed­ly se­cured more than 100 patents to pro­tect Hu­mi­ra, the best-sell­ing drug on the plan­et and a multi­bil­lion-dol­lar fran­chise.

While the 20-year term is in line with cur­rent lim­its, Bloomberg al­so didn’t spec­i­fy if his so­lu­tion would al­low for patent ex­ten­sions (max­i­mum 5 years) un­der the Hatch-Wax­man Act.

The oth­er part of Bloomberg’s re­form would have drug com­pa­nies pay roy­al­ties to the NIH if they use NIH IP and turn it in­to a com­mer­cial prod­uct — which can be con­tro­ver­sial as il­lus­trat­ed in Gilead’s re­cent dis­putes with the HHS over HIV patents. Bloomberg stopped short of spelling out the con­se­quences for any phar­ma play­ers who don’t com­ply with his poli­cies. Sen­a­tors Eliz­a­beth War­ren and Bernie Sanders — who are polling ahead of Bloomberg — have both sug­gest­ed that they would seize or break drug patents over what they view as egre­gious pric­ing.

Jazz CEO Bruce Cozadd didn’t beat around the bush.

In his first video meeting with GW Pharma chief Justin Gover last July 8, he offered to pay $172 a share to get the company, which had beaten the odds in getting its remarkable cannabinoid drug Epidiolex across the regulatory finish line for epilepsy. GW’s stock closed at $129 that day.

Cozadd had already done his homework on the financing to make sure he could swing it the way he wanted. He just needed to do some due diligence before making the non-binding bid firm.

Actemra’s failure to hit the primary endpoint in a Phase III study didn’t stop the FDA from granting Roche priority review. And it’s certainly not standing in the way of a sixth approval for Roche’s IL-6 drug.

Regulators have cleared Actemra, or tocilizumab, for systemic sclerosis-associated interstitial lung disease in adult patients. Roche’s big Genentech subsidiary notes that it is the first biologic approved for this rare disease.