Ocasio-Cortez Slams Big Pharma for Gaming U.S. Patent System

Press Release

WATCH HERE

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14) highlighted the need to develop more stringent standards in the U.S. pharmaceutical patent system to avoid the over-patenting of brand-name drugs during a hearing in the Health Subcommittee of the Committee on Energy and Commerce.

Although the pharmaceutical patent system is intended to reward innovation, Big Pharma games the system to increase their profits at patients' expense. By making minor changes to products, pharmaceutical companies, like AbbVie and AstraZeneca, monopolize the drug market - preventing cheaper drugs from becoming available and plunging working-class families into a prescription medication affordability trap.

Find Representative Ocasio-Cortez's remarks as delivered below:

"Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to all of our witnesses for being here today.

I want to talk about one aspect of innovation in health care, which is our pharmaceutical patent system.

I've served on many different committees in Congress at this point- Financial Services, you know, Natural Resources, Oversight, and this word, innovation, can include really incredible breakthroughs that saved people's lives, and also a lot of scammy behavior that we see across industries, you know, in financial services, stock buybacks, for example, being an innovation that doesn't really create anything new of value, but is certainly a new way to juice some numbers.

And so I think I want to dig in a little bit on our pharmaceutical patent system, because this system is critical to drug development in the United States and ensuring that breakthrough drugs become available to patients here.

But it is also a system that is abused by Big Pharma to prevent long standing drugs from becoming cheaper and more widely available to everyday Americans. Dr. Hwang, when it comes to pharmaceuticals, the federal government reviews a company's patent application and determines whether or not it meets specific standards, like creating a brand new drug to treat a specific disease. Is that correct?

That's correct.

And when patents and these patents, when a drug company earns a patent for a new drug, they get a period of protection from competition when no other company can sell that same drug, typically 20 years from the filing, correct?

Right.

And the logic of this is that if you are a company and you invested millions of dollars in the development of a drug, you should have exclusivity once you develop that drug to earn that money back and have that return and be rewarded for that innovation, right? That's kind of the gist of the system.

But over the years, we've seen some drug companies do some curious things with this.

We've actually seen them, I think, abuse this period of protection to create monopolies over the market and then increase the prices on their drugs.

One example of Big Pharma abusing this system is when they file additional patents.

They'll make a new drug, they'll get their 20 years. Then they'll file additional patents that involve really minor and often unnecessary changes to their product. So they'll have a great pill, and then they'll just change it to a capsule and then refile the patent. And we're seeing that in quite a few treatments, correct?

That's correct. And in a small number of cases, some of these reformulations can help our patients. They can make treatments more available and easier to use. But in the vast majority of cases, these are life cycle extending.

Yeah. In fact, the pharmaceutical company AbbVie used this strategy with their drug Humira, which is used to treat rheumatoid arthritis.

By barely changing their products, they obtained over 130 patents that gave them continued exclusive market control over rheumatoid arthritis treatments. And during this time, the price from Humira went from $500 for one syringe to nearly $3,000 per syringe, and that led to about $80,000 for a one year supply for a patient.

In fact, AbbVie isn't the only one doing this. I have an example right here from AstraZeneca. This is an inhaler pump. It was loaned to me by someone with asthma, and we've seen that AstraZeneca, what they did was that they had this treatment, the actual medication inside did not change at all the administration of it.

But they filed a new patent to maintain exclusivity of it. And can you guess what was the great innovation that was worth this not going generic for?

I'm not aware, but I think you know the answer, Congresswoman.

Yeah. It's this little plastic piece right here, and it's one of the big features of that new patent. This thing to keep the cap from coming off, was a major part of the new patent that they had filed. And to extend and to prevent this lifesaving drug from going generic and bringing down costs for everybody.

I was just curious, what do you think we do about this?

I think very quickly, and I'd be happy to submit more for the record, but, these strategies unfortunately reward the very thing that we should be avoiding, which is aggressive legal maneuvers instead of the risky basic science that our country should prioritize.

Thank you very much. And I yield back. "

###