The Supreme Court has been busy the last couple weeks issuing new rulings in a wide range of cases.
In the realm of health care, two decisions could be good news for patients.
The first case might mean more access to cheaper, generic prescription drugs. Most people know that when a company creates a new drug, they get a patent for it so that no one can make a generic drug for at least a few years.
In some cases, the drug company holding the patent has essentially paid generic drug companies to drop legal challenges to the patent. It’s called “pay-to-delay” and it keeps cheaper, generic drugs out of the hands of patients.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) took one drug company, Actavis, to court over these “pay-to-delay” settlements, but the case was appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court wisely decided that the FTC has the right to challenge drug companies that “pay-to-delay”. While that underlying antitrust suit still needs to be settled, hopefully it will lead to quicker access to generic drugs.
The second case prevents companies from patenting our genes – kind of. It’s a complicated case, but here are the basics. Myriad Genetics patented the BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 genes, recently made famous by Angelina Jolie. Having a mutation in the BRCA-1 gene can raise the risk of developing breast cancer from 12% to 60%.
Since Myriad held the patent on the gene, it was the only company that could develop the test to let patients know if they had a mutation. A test they charged $4,000 for.
With the ruling from the Supreme Court last week, other companies at least now have the prospect of developing other tests for mutations since Myriad can’t continue to hold a patent on the entire gene.
Where the decision gets complicated and the future gets murky is that the Supreme Court took care to note that complementary DNA could be patented. It would be well beyond the scope of this post to explain cDNA. Luckily others have done that for us.
The bottom line here is that no one company can patent an entire gene, opening the door for others to conduct research, develop tests and therapies. And that, should be good news for patients.