Patent Expires On Best Selling Drug of All Time

Hugh Pickens writes "The U.S. patent has just expired on Lipitor, the best-selling drug of all time, as the first generic versions go on sale, marking the end of a brand that has dominated the drug industry, lowered the cholesterol of tens of millions of patients, and generated $10.7 billion last year in annual sales. But drug manufacturer Pfizer, dependent on Lipitor for almost one-fifth of the company's revenue, does not intend to go down without a fight. Pfizer is employing unprecedented tactics to hold onto as many Lipitor prescriptions as it can with an aggressive marketing plan and forging deals with insurers, pharmacy benefit managers and patients to meet or beat the price of its generic replacements because even at the lower price, Pfizer has a huge profit margin because of the relatively low cost of materials for Lipitor. Some deals require pharmacies to reject prescriptions for low-cost generics and substitute a discounted name-brand Lipitor while other deals block generic makers from mail-order services that account for an estimated 40 percent of all Lipitor prescriptions. 'Pfizer's tactic of dressing up as a generics company is pulling the rug under the incentive system created to foster the development of generic drugs,' says attorney David A. Balto."

Comments

Patent vs Copyright

[Dan East]

So, if congress has been able to withstand the lobbying for indefinite patents, given the massive amount of money on the line as indicated by this single drug patent, how come they fold to the likes of Disney when it comes to copyright? Maybe it's the cuteness of the cartoon characters.

Re:See. Patents/Copyright spur innovation.

[bky1701]

More often than not, they are "invented" based on research done at universities; including publicly funded ones. We should be cutting the middle-man and funding those projects more, rather than creating artificial property to encourage corporations to "invent" drugs.

Re:Choosing the correct tactics

[MightyMartian]

I'm unclear here. Since when did pharmacists suddenly get the right to override a doctor's prescription? How can Pfizer actually get a pharmacist to sign an exclusivity agreement.

Re:See. Patents/Copyright spur innovation.

[Reziac]

They may also outcompete on patient satisfaction.

Generics don't necessarily equate (nor do branded versions), and both for that reason and physician inertia, the prescription market tends to be slow to shift. Here's an example:

http://www.citizen.org/Page.aspx?pid=3106

As to why they don't equate -- even when the active ingredient is identical, the various binders and excipients can greatly differ, and that can mean that some patients only do well on a specific brand. This can be particularly critical with drugs that are prescribed in very low doses (micrograms) or that tend to degrade very rapidly.

I was just reading a study on that the other day (can't find it again offhand but it was in NEJM) -- for one commonly-prescribed drug, results were radically different depending on the binder -- from 18% to 90%. This can result in nominally-identical drugs not being bioequivalent (and the FDA has a rating system for bioequivalence).

[BTW as it turned out, the cheap old-fashioned sugar-based binders performed best.]