Democrats are suddenly eyeing a valuable pharma asset: its patents
From this article:
"Democrats, newly empowered in D.C. and on the hunt for bigger and bolder ways to lower drug prices, are suddenly taking aim at a far more central part of pharma’s monopoly power: the patents the industry holds on its drugs.
For years, lawmakers from both parties have shied away from addressing the industry’s intellectual property. Muck with a drug company’s government-granted monopoly, the thinking goes, and investments in research and development will disappear. Pharma even helped to scuttle a broad, bipartisan patent reform effort in 2015, in part because the industry worried that even small changes focused on bad actors would open the door to bigger ones."
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