Patent System Blamed For Skewed Drug Development

Recent work by three academics looks at how the patent system in tandem with the FDA approval process skews drug development toward treatments for late-stage cancer at the expense of early-stage treatments or prevention. Health economist Austin Frakt, writing in the New York Times, reports on the research and suggests ways the problem might be addressed. The main issue is that the time it takes to test and obtain FDA approval for a drug counts as part of the exclusive patent period, and it takes less time to get definitive test results when the malady being addressed is a late-stage aggressive cancer. The researchers calculate that during a single year that was looked at, this so-called “commercial lag” costs almost a million “life-years.”