How Big Pharma secures drug monopolies | Tahir Amin | Big Think

So the patent system has been a great driver of medical inventions. We've seen some terrific discoveries and inventions in the medical space. But as we've evolved in the system, I think we're starting to see—as a lawyer who's practiced in this area—we're starting to see a lot of strategies that are played by pharmaceutical companies in order to maintain their monopolistic hold or their exclusivity hold over a particular product.

And what they do is they ratchet up a number of patents around a particular product in order to prevent competition from getting in. And we all know that once you have competition, prices drive down. There's a number of studies that show prices can drop more than 50% if you get competition in the marketplace sooner. So the idea that companies want to do is to basically prevent that competition from coming in earlier.

And then the other argument of that is: are they then really inventing new things? Because what they do is they hold on to the marketplace as long as they can on the existing product. They extend the franchise out by using patents, sometimes with the potential of holding the market for 40 years unless litigated. And we all know that litigation doesn't solve all the problems.

And we've seen that in a number of the top-selling drugs in the United States. We've done studies as an organization where we have seen price hikes between 2012 and 2016 on the top 12 selling drugs in the United States have 68%. And we've seen in parallel to that the number of patents that have been stacked up on those products, even after the product has been approved, even after the initial patent has expired, which is a 20 year term.

And so they're just pushing it out further and further and further so that they can delay the competition getting in. And that all leads to market power and it all leads to the ability to increase prices at will. If you look at a pharmaceutical company, the scientists who work there, the people who work on the development of drugs, their primary purpose is to help people, I believe. I genuinely believe that.

I believe the conversations I've had with people from that sector. They believe that if they bring a new product to market and it saves someone's life or it can actually make somebody healthy, they really do believe that. Unfortunately, there's a business side to it, as well. And so what you have is for every scientist, you have probably two lawyers who are watching over them saying, “OK, how can we extract a patent out of this and to make sure that nobody else gets in there?”

And so what we have is then you have—in particularly the pharmaceutical market—there's an argument that it's become overly financialized in terms of its investors who drive what companies do, rather than maybe the initially intended purpose was to deliver health products and to help make people not have to become ill and stay alive.

And I think some of that has got lost in the process as pharmaceutical companies now really start to look at their bottom line and their shareholders and what the investors want rather than what their original purpose was (to help people become healthier). And I think that the bargain of that has tilted more towards the financial-ization of things rather than thinking about health first.

I-MAK comprises lawyers and scientists who have come from the private practice background. We've all worked in industry. I myself have been a solicitor in the United Kingdom, working for the commercial side of intellectual property for over 10 years. And we've taken that knowledge to apply it in a public interest way, whereby we look at, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry, how do pharmaceutical corporations strategize their patent filings in order to get the maximum protection?

So what we do is, we look at a product, it could even be still in development, and we'll do what we call the due diligence and the analysis of all their patent filings. So for example, if it's a product that revolves around a small chemical compound, we'll identify what that chemical structure is, an...