Thread by @IMAKglobal

🧵 (1/16): Our key takeaways from the House Oversight Committee’s final report concluding its three-year investigation into the pharmaceutical industry’s anti-competitive pricing and business tactics.

https://twitter.com/IMAKglobal/status/1469343547304329222

.@RepMaloney introduces the report with a letter to Committee Members. In it, she reviews what their nearly 3-year investigation revealed:

“Drug companies have raised prices relentlessly for decades while manipulating the patent system and other laws”

https://twitter.com/realtahiramin/status/1469359145539321859

Over 269 pages, the report details the many ways drugmakers abuse the U.S. patent system and outdated laws to prolong monopoly power and raise prices on life-saving drugs.
🔗oversight.house.gov/sites/democrat…

The report identifies how drugmakers will often apply for "dozens—or in some cases, hundreds—of secondary patents to extend their monopolies in the United States, while facing generic and biosimilar competition abroad."

“Secondary patents make up the majority of the pharmaceutical industry’s patent portfolio”

Executives like @abbvie CEO Richard A. Gonzalez will often try to defend frivolous secondary patents by claiming each one represents another “innovation”.

https://twitter.com/IMAKglobal/status/1407435976104808448

The Committee debunks this myth by showcasing internal documents such as this slide touting @abbvie's “Broad U.S. Humira Patent Estate”. That strategy included obtaining additional patents for “simply specifying the dose of Humira".
🔗oversight.house.gov/sites/democrat…

As @realtahiramin demonstrated in his 17-tweet dissection of Congress’s report on pharma consultant @McKinsey, the term “innovation” is often used to give “the impression of progress when really it's a way to extract monopolies and profits”

https://twitter.com/realtahiramin/status/1457065616427335682

In a second example, lawmakers explain how @abbvie uses a “drip feed” patent strategy to “file successively more specific patents to extract a total of almost 30 years of patent protection and monopoly pricing on its cancer drug Imbruvica”.

Our reports on #Imbruvica & #Humira break down @abbvie’s abusive patenting practices. Read them here:

📑Imbruvica: i-mak.org/imbruvica
📑Humira: i-mak.org/humira

Read @realtahiramin’s @medium post on Imbruvica’s patent wall here:
medium.com/@realtahiramin…

The Committee also highlights how @Amgen leveraged outdated patent laws to earn a patent extending its monopoly on arthritis drug #Enbrel that “added as much as $5 billion to Amgen’s value.”

"The new patent kept prices high for U.S. patients who had expected that lower-cost biosimilar versions of Enbrel would enter the market after Amgen’s main patent on the drug expired in 2012."

The Committee compares drugmakers’ U.S. patenting strategies to their strategies abroad to show the industry-wide emphasis on abusing the U.S. patent system due to outdated laws and other system weaknesses.

As we’ve shown, drugmakers file 2.5x more patent applications in the U.S. vs Europe. This is because they know they can do endless repeat filings of the same patent application in the U.S, all of which add to their arsenal of patents for use in litigation & delaying competitors.

The Committee leaves Congress with two recommendations:

1️⃣ Prohibit anti-competitive agreements
2️⃣ Prohibit other abuses of the patent system

House Oversight’s nearly three-year investigation has exposed the systemic drug patent abuse driving the American drug pricing crisis. We are honored to see our work at @IMAKGlobal featured throughout the investigation.

The responsibility to rein in drug patent abuse rests w/ federal leaders. With the H/O investigation complete, Congress & @USPTO must act decisively to change the structural issues that have led to dysfunction & friction in the patent system fueling America’s drug pricing crisis.