The biopharmaceutical industry is committed to working every day to discover and develop new treatments and cures for patients battling diseases like Alzheimer’s, heart disease, and, most recently, COVID-19. This is made possible by America’s system of intellectual property (IP) protections.

Our IP system – including patents – promotes competition and is the foundation for new treatments and cures for patients. Nobody has a monopoly on treating a condition, and brand patented drugs often have many competitors.

Innovation shouldn’t stop once a new drug becomes available to patients. Additional patent protections only cover enhancements to a product and allow companies to continue working to improve medicines, making them more effective for patients – whether reducing side effects or finding a new disease a medicine can treat.

The patent system strikes a balance between promoting innovation and affordability for patients who rely on new treatments, improvements and cures. Patents incentivize innovation by granting exclusive rights to new inventions for a set period of time, while requiring innovators to publicly share information about their inventions – allowing more generic drugs to be developed and enter the market after patent protections expire.

Policies that undermine IP protections, such as government seizure of patent protections to let competitors use that patented invention, threaten incentives to develop new treatments and cures.

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