Patent Abuse

Big Pharma has a long history of price-gouging American patients through tactics designed to game the U.S. patent system and block competition from more affordable alternatives — enabling Big Pharma to maintain monopolies over their biggest money-makers.

The anti-competitive tactics most commonly used by Big Pharma to game the patent system?

Product Hopping

In which a pharmaceutical company makes a small tweak to an existing drug, such as a new way to administer it or a new dosage level. The drug company then patents that change just before the original patent expires, extending exclusivity, and therefore monopoly pricing, on the product.

Patent Thicketing

Where a pharmaceutical company files many, often dozens or hundreds, of patents on a single medication to extend exclusivity and block competition from more affordable options, for months, years or even decades.

The pharmaceutical industry’s egregious abuse of the patent system is a root cause of out-of-control prescription drug prices because it enables Big Pharma to repeatedly hike prices on existing drugs and set high launch prices on new medications.

Get a Dose of Reality on Big Pharma’s
Anti-Competitive Tactics

$ 40 Billion

Big Pharma’s anti-competitive tactics, including patent abuse, cost U.S. consumers over $40 billion in just one year, according to a recent analysis from I-MAK.

$ 16 Billion

Big Pharma’s patent thickets on just five drugs cost U.S. consumers over $16 billion in lost savings, according to a 2023 report from Matrix Global Advisors (MGA).

4x

Brand name drug companies target their most profitable products for reformulation to extend monopolies and prohibit generic competition from entering the market. “Between 1995 and 2010, approval of new formulations was four times more likely among blockbuster drugs,” according to a May 2022 study published in JAMA Health Forum.

300+

In a particularly egregious case study in Big Pharma’s greed, AbbVie applied for 300+ patents on its blockbuster drug Humira, securing more than half of them. 94 percent of the patents filed on Humira came after the drug was initially approved by the FDA, helping to block competition for years and generate almost $200 billion for AbbVie. In 2022, the drug brought in $21 billion – more money for the company than all 32 teams in the NFL combined.

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