Published on Oct. 14, 2024

On Oct. 8, Professor Erika Lietzan participated in a Hudson Institute webinar entitled, “Do Drug Patents Cause High Prices?” with Professor Adam Mossoff from the Antonin Scalia Law School and Corey Salsberg, vice president and global head of intellectual property affairs for Novartis. They discussed the importance of evidence-based policy making, and the work that has been done to explore the connection between drug patents and drug prices. 

In this webinar, Professor Lietzan discussed several important empirical studies that she has published on this issue.  She focused on a paper she published in 2023, Solutions Still Searching for a Problem, which audited the primary empirical dataset offered to substantiate claims that pharmaceutical companies engage in “evergeening.” 

The evergreening claim is that by securing additional patents after approval of their new drugs, brand drug companies enjoy a period of exclusivity in the market that is longer than the initial patents on the drug would have provided, and longer than acceptable as a normative matter. The evergreening dataset counts the patents associated with each new drug, and it is held out as indicating just how far the companies have managed to extend their “monopolies” in the market. 

In the webinar, Professor Lietzan explained the conceptual flaw involved, and explained that she and her coauthor had audited more than 200 entries, finding  generic competition on average seven years before the dataset implies it would.  She’s written extensively about drug patents and innovation, including also The “Evergreening” Metaphor, in which I examined and explained the basic conceptual flaw with the evergreening argument in more detail.