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Why should patients care about patents?
Patents encourage companies to invest in discovering drugs. Developing a new medicine is an extremely expensive and risky process that takes many years. It usually entails performing years of research and conducting clinical studies at multiple centers, a necessary safeguard for the public that nevertheless imposes heavy burdens, especially for small companies. Companies spend, on average, more than $800 million to develop a drug. In fact, of the 1,000-plus companies and research institutions represented by BIO, only 5 percent are profitable.
If there were no patent protection, competitors would immediately copy and sell an innovative drug as soon as it was approved for sale, thus avoiding the development costs. Because the competitors would have lower costs, they could capture the market by offering the drug at a lower price. In this situation, the innovator would never recover the development costs. Thus, without patents, companies would be reluctant to invest in research and drug discovery programs.
Modern biotechnology offers unprecedented opportunities for developing medicines to treat and cure currently intractable diseases. It relies in large part on using gene-based inventions to make these medicines because it is either impossible or uneconomical to make them in other ways. Patents on such inventions protect them from misappropriation by commercial entities and allow a company to have confidence that it can service a viable market if its development efforts succeed. Without patents on gene-based inventions, the rate of medical innovation coming from biotechnology would slow dramatically. Ultimately, patients would be deprived of new therapies.
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