President Joe Biden speaks about health care and prescription drug costs at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas in 2023.a Biden administration proposal could make it harder, and possibly less lucrative, to license faculty inventions developed with government funding for research.the federal government’s major role in paying for basic scientific research.
If the change goes into effect, the tactic would work only for a small number of drugs, according to research by professors at Stanford and Arizona State published in March by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Only 2.5% of the 883 new drugs the FDA approved from 1985 to 2022 are based only on public-sector patents, Stanford Law School’s Lisa Larrimore Ouellette and Arizona State’s Bhaven N. Sampat wrote. That totals just 22 drugs in nearly four decades.
The researchers cited a high-cost prostate cancer treatment as a rare example of high-cost drug developed exclusively through taxpayer-funded research. The drug costs as much as $190,000 a year. Even so, the National Institutes of Health in March rejected a petition to license the three Xtandi patents to a generic manufacturer, because the treatment is widely available.