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Race And Regulation Podcast Episode 6 - Race, Social Inequalities, And Clinical Drug Trials, Jill A. Fisher Jul 2022

Race And Regulation Podcast Episode 6 - Race, Social Inequalities, And Clinical Drug Trials, Jill A. Fisher

Penn Program on Regulation Podcasts

As mandated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, clinical trials for new pharmaceuticals enroll healthy people as paid research participants to test for drug safety and tolerability. But the social injustices from these trials are too often overlooked. Drawing on her award-winning book, Adverse Events, Jill Fisher of UNC-Chapel Hill’s Center for Bioethics explains how clinical drug trials attract disproportionate participation by racial and ethnic minorities who then disproportionately assume risks of participating in these trials, often just to stay financially afloat.


Eviscerating Patent Scope, Shahrokh Falati Jan 2022

Eviscerating Patent Scope, Shahrokh Falati

Articles & Chapters

The scope of patent claims directed to inventions in the field of pharmaceuticals and biotechnology has been stumped by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s recent jurisprudence on 35 U.S.C. § 112. Specifically, the application of a heightened test for enablement of claims to a genus of compounds with functional limitations or a genus of therapeutic antibodies, coupled with an increasingly broader application of the written description doctrine, has resulted in considerable uncertainty in the biopharmaceutical industry. The Federal Circuit’s shift in interpreting 35 U.S.C. § 112 contravenes the statute and Supreme Court precedent by splitting the singular …


Please Consult Your Lawyer Before Taking Sorrell: How The Fda Should Approach Social Media For Prescription Drug Advertising, Steven Valentino Jan 2021

Please Consult Your Lawyer Before Taking Sorrell: How The Fda Should Approach Social Media For Prescription Drug Advertising, Steven Valentino

Upper Level Writing Requirement Research Papers

No abstract provided.


Distorted Drug Patents, Erika Lietzan Oct 2020

Distorted Drug Patents, Erika Lietzan

Faculty Publications

Drug patents are distorted. Unlike most other inventors, drug inventors must complete years of testing to the government’s specifications and seek government approval to commercialize their inventions. All the while, the patent term runs. When a drug inventor finally launches a medicine that embodies the invention, only a fraction of the patent life remains. And yet, conventional wisdom holds — and empirical studies show — that patent life is essential to innovation in the pharmaceutical industry, perhaps more so than any other inventive industry. Congress tried to do something about this in 1984, authorizing the Patent and Trademark Office to …


Importing Prescription Drugs From Canada — Legal And Practical Problems With The Trump Administration's Proposal, Rachel E. Sachs, Nicholas Bagley May 2020

Importing Prescription Drugs From Canada — Legal And Practical Problems With The Trump Administration's Proposal, Rachel E. Sachs, Nicholas Bagley

Articles

As Americans report ever-growing difficulty affording their prescription drugs, President Donald Trump has come under increasing pressure to act. To date, the Trump administration has attempted to advance a number of policy initiatives by means of executive action, but it has not yet adopted a program that would meaningfully assist patients. Most recently, the administration proposed a rule that, if finalized, would allow states to develop programs to import lower-priced prescription drugs from Canada, with the intent of reducing spending on drugs by U.S. patients and states and increasing access for patients.


The Cost Of Novelty, Will Nicholson Price Ii Mar 2020

The Cost Of Novelty, Will Nicholson Price Ii

Articles

Patent law tries to spur the development of new and better innova­tive technology. But it focuses much more on “new” than “better”—and it turns out that “new” carries real social costs. I argue that patent law promotes innovation that diverges from existing technology, either a little (what I call “differentiating innovation”) or a lot (“exploring innova­tion”), at the expense of innovation that tells us more about existing technology (“deepening innovation”). Patent law’s focus on newness is unsurprising, and fits within a well-told narrative of innovative diversity accompanied by market selection of the best technologies. Unfortunately, innovative diversity brings not only …


Direct-To-Consumer Ads Are Misleading: Concise Statements Of Effectiveness Should Be Required, Robert A. Bohrer Jan 2019

Direct-To-Consumer Ads Are Misleading: Concise Statements Of Effectiveness Should Be Required, Robert A. Bohrer

Faculty Scholarship

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising of prescription pharmaceuticals has been the subject of much criticism and the issue has become even more pressing with the Trump administration’s proposal to require the disclosure of prices in DTC ads. In this article I argue that a more powerful approach to the problem of DTC ads would require the disclosure of the effectiveness of the advertised drugs, at least as found in the clinical trials submitted for FDA approval. To support the need for an effectiveness disclosure, I describe the problem of DTC ads and examine representative ads to illustrate the potential of such ads …


Drug Prices, Dying Patients, And The Pharmaceutical Marketplace: A New Conditional Approval Pathway For Critical Unmet Medical Needs, Robert A. Bohrer Jan 2019

Drug Prices, Dying Patients, And The Pharmaceutical Marketplace: A New Conditional Approval Pathway For Critical Unmet Medical Needs, Robert A. Bohrer

Faculty Scholarship

Prescription drugs have been a major topic in the news for much of the past year. There are two issues which appear often: first, the very high prices of new drugs, particularly the "specialty" drugs developed for serious diseases; and second, the time required for FDA approval in relation to the perceived need for earlier access to new therapies for critically ill patients. Much less in the news, but lurking behind both issues, is the need for better information for physicians and patients to use in making decisions about prescribing and taking drugs, and for insurance companies and the government …


Drugs' Other Side Effects, Craig J. Konnoth Jan 2019

Drugs' Other Side Effects, Craig J. Konnoth

Publications

Drugs often induce unintended, adverse physiological reactions in those that take them—what we commonly refer to as “side-effects.” However, drugs can produce other, broader, unintended, even non-physiological harms. For example, some argue that taking Truvada, a drug that prevents HIV transmission, increases promiscuity and decreases condom use. Expensive Hepatitis C treatments threaten to bankrupt state Medicaid programs. BiDil, which purported to treat heart conditions for self-identified African-Americans, has been criticized for reifying racial categories. Although the Food & Drug Administration (“FDA”) has broad discretion under the Food, Drugs, and Cosmetics Act (“FDCA”) to regulate drugs, it generally considers only traditional …


Limiting State Flexibility In Drug Pricing, Nicholas Bagley, Rachel E. Sachs Sep 2018

Limiting State Flexibility In Drug Pricing, Nicholas Bagley, Rachel E. Sachs

Articles

Throughout the United States, escalating drug prices are putting immense pressure on state budgets. Several states are looking for ways to push back. Last year, Massachusetts asked the Trump administration for a waiver that would, among other things, allow its Medicaid program to decline to cover costly drugs for which there is limited or inadequate evidence of clinical efficacy. By credibly threatening to exclude such drugs from coverage, Massachusetts hoped to extract price concessions and constrain the fastest-growing part of its Medicaid budget.


Drug Approval In A Learning Health System, W. Nicholson Price Jul 2018

Drug Approval In A Learning Health System, W. Nicholson Price

Articles

The current system of FDA approval seems to make few happy. Some argue FDA approves drugs too slowly; others too quickly. Many agree that FDA—and the health system generally—should gather information after drugs are approved to learn how well they work and how safe they are. This is hard to do. FDA has its own surveillance systems, but those systems face substantial limitations in practical use. Drug companies can also conduct their own studies, but have little incentive to do so, and often fail to fulfil study commitments made to FDA. Proposals to improve this dynamic often suggest gathering more …


Scientific Trials--In The Laboratories, Not The Courts, Nicholas Bagley, Aaron E. Carroll, Pieter A. Cohen Jan 2018

Scientific Trials--In The Laboratories, Not The Courts, Nicholas Bagley, Aaron E. Carroll, Pieter A. Cohen

Articles

In 2015, one of us published a peer-reviewed study, together with colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, replicating prior research from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) detecting a designer stimulant, β-methylphenylethylamine, in sports, weight loss, and “cognitive function” supplements sold in the United States. The confirmatory study prompted the FDA to take enforcement action against companies selling the stimulant as a dietary ingredient. One of the companies that received an FDA warning letter sued the study’s authors for $200 million in damages for libel, claiming, without supporting scientific evidence, that multiple statements in the article were …


Deterring Innovation: New York V. Actavis And The Duty To Subsidize Competitors' Market Entry, Joanna Shepherd Jan 2016

Deterring Innovation: New York V. Actavis And The Duty To Subsidize Competitors' Market Entry, Joanna Shepherd

Faculty Articles

This Article examines a relatively new business strategy in the pharmaceutical market -- "product hopping" or "product replacement" -- in which brand pharmaceutical companies shift their marketing efforts from a drug nearing the end of its patent period to a new, substitute drug with a longer patent life. In July 2015, the Second Circuit issued an opinion in the first appellate case addressing pharmaceutical product replacement, New York ex rel. Schneiderman v. Actavis PLC. This Article explains that product replacement is the predictable business response to the incentives created by patent law and state substitution laws, and withdrawing an …


A Profile Of Bio-Pharma Consolidation Activity, Jordan Paradise Jan 2016

A Profile Of Bio-Pharma Consolidation Activity, Jordan Paradise

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.


Aids Activists, Fda Regulation, And The Amendment Of America's Drug Constitution, Lewis Grossman Jan 2016

Aids Activists, Fda Regulation, And The Amendment Of America's Drug Constitution, Lewis Grossman

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This Article explores how AIDS activists, desperate for access to potentially life-saving pharmaceuticals, permanently transformed America’s “drug constitution.” Their advocacy altered the FDA’s interpretation and application of the federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) so as to expedite the availability of new, unproven drugs for critical illnesses, thus enhancing individual patients’ autonomy to make therapeutic choices without government interference.The FDCA is more than simple set of instructions to a federal agency — it is a source of vitally important and deeply entrenched institutional and normative frameworks. Like major civil rights, antitrust, and environmental statutes, the FDCA should be viewed …


New Dtca Guidance — Enough To Empower Consumers?, Christopher Robertson Sep 2015

New Dtca Guidance — Enough To Empower Consumers?, Christopher Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

As one of only two countries that permit direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) of pharmaceuticals, the United States tasks the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) with regulating that advertising to ensure that it doesn't mislead consumers. When a drug maker publishes or broadcasts a claim that its drug has benefits in a particular disease, the FDA requires it to include information on the product's risks as well. Since it's not feasible for companies to include all the important information about their products in a television ad, the FDA requires them to refer viewers to more complete information, such as that in a …


Excluding Patentability Of Therapeutic Methods, Including Methods Using Pharmaceuticals, For The Treatment Of Humans Under Trade Related Aspects Of Intellectual Property Rights Article 27(3)(A), Michael Henry Davis Jan 2014

Excluding Patentability Of Therapeutic Methods, Including Methods Using Pharmaceuticals, For The Treatment Of Humans Under Trade Related Aspects Of Intellectual Property Rights Article 27(3)(A), Michael Henry Davis

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights ("TRIPS"), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade ("GATT"), and the World Trade Organization ("WTO") debacle has radically altered the traditional ability of nations to adopt whatever patent regime seems appropriate to them. Instead, TRIPS requires all member nations, even those which never thought it appropriate to grant such state monopolies, to afford patent protection to areas which had never been granted before-most dramatically in the area of health related innovations and, most expensively, pharmaceuticals. Until TRIPS, most -- or at least a number approaching half -- countries simply did …


Actavis, The Reverse Payment Fallacy, And The Continuing Need For Regulatory Solutions, Daniel A. Crane Jan 2014

Actavis, The Reverse Payment Fallacy, And The Continuing Need For Regulatory Solutions, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

The Actavis decision punted more than it decided. Although narrowing the range of possible outcomes by rejecting the legal rules at the extremes and opting for a rule of reason middle ground, the opinion failed to grapple with the most challenging issues of regulatory policy raised by pharmaceutical patent settlements. In particular, it failed to clearly delineate the social costs of permitting and disallowing patent settlements, avoided grappling with the crucial issues of patent validity and infringement, and erroneously focused on “reverse payments” as a distinctive antitrust problem when equally or more anticompetitive settlements can be crafted without reverse payments. …


Christopher V. Smithkline Beecham Corporation: An Unsurprising Loss For Pharmaceutical Sales Representatives And An Erosion Of Power For Administrative Agencies, Anna Johnston Jan 2013

Christopher V. Smithkline Beecham Corporation: An Unsurprising Loss For Pharmaceutical Sales Representatives And An Erosion Of Power For Administrative Agencies, Anna Johnston

Proxy

No abstract provided.


Brief Of Aarp And The National Legislative Association On Prescription Drug Prices As Amici Curiae In Support Of Petitioners, Sean Flynn Mar 2011

Brief Of Aarp And The National Legislative Association On Prescription Drug Prices As Amici Curiae In Support Of Petitioners, Sean Flynn

Amicus Briefs

This brief was written in support of Vermont’s Prescription Confidentiality Law, which regulates the confidentiality of prescription records and protects them from being used by pharmaceutical companies as a “targeting tool” to identify doctors most susceptible to sales messages.


Provigil: A Commentary, Daniel A. Crane Jan 2011

Provigil: A Commentary, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

Michael Carrier's case study on Provigil' offers new support for the view that Big Pharma is to blame for stymieing competition, retarding innovation, and inflating prices in the drug industry. Carrier argues that Cephalon was able to thwart generic entry by a combination of anticompetitive strategies. It entered into a reverse payment settlement agreement with generics seeking to enter the market. These settlements purported to allow generic entry before the expiration of the patent period, but, according to Carrier, the promise of early entry was negated by the second prong of Cephalon's anticompetitive strategy. During the time that it had …


Two Masters, Carl E. Schneider Jan 2010

Two Masters, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

American government rests on the principle of distrust of government. Not only is power within the federal government checked and balanced. Power is divided between the federal government and the state governments. So what if a state law conflicts with a federal law? The Constitution says that the "Constitution, and the Laws of the United States ... shall be the supreme Law of the Land; ... any Thing in the ... Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding." Sometimes the conflict between federal and state law is obvious and the Supremacy Clause is easily applied. But sometimes ...


Constitutional Flaw?, Carl E. Schneider Jul 2009

Constitutional Flaw?, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

Do terminally ill patients have a constitutional right "to decide, without FDA interference, whether to assume the risks of using potentially life-saving investigational drugs that the FDA has yet to approve for commercial marketing, but that the FDA has determined, after Phase I clinical human trials, are safe enough for further testing"? In Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs v. McClellan, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia said "no." In Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs v. von Eschenbach, a panel (three judges) of the United States Court of Appeals …


Pharma's Nonobvious Problem, Rebecca S. Eisenberg Jan 2008

Pharma's Nonobvious Problem, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

This Article considers the effect of the recent decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in KSR International Co. v. Teleflex, Inc. on the nonobviousness standard for patentability as applied to pharmaceutical patents. By calling for an expansive and flexible analysis and disapproving of the use of rigid formulas in evaluating an invention for obviousness, KSR may appear to make it easier for generic competitors to challenge the validity of drug patents. But an examination of the Federal Circuit's nonobviousness jurisprudence in the context of such challenges reveals that the Federal Circuit has been employing all along the sort of flexible …


Brief Of Amicus Curiae, The National Legislative Association On Prescription Drug Prices, The New Hampshire Medical Society, And Prescription Policy Choices In Support Of Defendant's Objection To Plaintiff's Motion For Preliminary Injunction, Sean Flynn Dec 2006

Brief Of Amicus Curiae, The National Legislative Association On Prescription Drug Prices, The New Hampshire Medical Society, And Prescription Policy Choices In Support Of Defendant's Objection To Plaintiff's Motion For Preliminary Injunction, Sean Flynn

Amicus Briefs

Plaintiffs in this case seek a preliminary injunction to prevent the enforcement of the New Hampshire Prescription Confidentiality Act, which protects consumers and the privacy interests of doctors in the state of New Hampshire from the increasingly common practice of using doctor-identifying information in prescription records to facilitate targeting of pharmaceutical marketing and gifts toward doctors who prescribe the most expensive drugs for their patients. This practice raises drug costs for all New Hampshire residents and compromises the professional autonomy of doctors. This brief addresses the failure of the plaintiffs to show that they are likely to succeed on the …


Drugged, Carl E. Schneider Jul 2006

Drugged, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

The Supreme Court's recent decision in Gonzales v. Oregon, like its decision last year in Gonzales v. Raich (the "medical marijuana" case), again raises questions about the bioethical consequences of the Controlled Substances Act. When, in 1970, Congress passed that act, it placed problematic drugs in one of five "schedules," and it authorized the U.S. attorney general to add or subtract drugs from the schedules. Drugs in schedule II have both a medical use and a high potential for abuse. Doctors may prescribe such drugs if they "obtain from the Attorney General a registration issued in accordance with the …


The Problem Of New Uses, Rebecca S. Eisenberg Jan 2005

The Problem Of New Uses, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

Discovering new uses for drugs that are already on the market seems like it ought to be the low-lying fruit of biopharmaceutical research and development (R&D). Firms have already made significant investments in developing these drugs and bringing them to market, including testing them in clinical trials, shepherding them through the FDA regulatory approval process, building production facilities, and training sales staff to market them to physicians. By this point, the drugs have begun to enjoy goodwill among patients and physicians and casual observations in the course of clinical experience may point to potential new uses. One might expect that …


Learning The Value Of Drugs - Is Rofecoxib A Regulatory Success Story?, Rebecca S. Eisenberg Jan 2005

Learning The Value Of Drugs - Is Rofecoxib A Regulatory Success Story?, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

Controversy over recent revelations concerning the adverse cardiovascular effects of selective cyclooxygenase- 2 (COX-2) inhibitors has generally been framed as a story of regulatory failure, in which the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has failed in its mission to protect the public from unsafe products. But this simplistic understanding of the mission of the FDA seems to make failure all but inevitable, if the reliable observation of the risks and benefits of a drug requires rigorous long-term studies. Perhaps in an earlier era the goal of drug regulation was simply to protect the public from poisons. Today, drug regulation guides …


Border Patrol, Carl E. Schneider Jul 2003

Border Patrol, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

Recently, the Supreme Court has encountered cases that concern perhaps our weightiest bioethical issue-how medical care is to be rationed. But this does not mean that the Court must therefore assess the justice of rationing, as many people incited by many journalists now fondly and firmly believe. In explaining why, we begin with a story about how Learned Hand remembered saying one day to Justice Holmes, "Well, sir, goodbye. Do justice!" Holmes turned quite sharply and said: "That is not my job. My job is to play the game according to the rules." If the Court doesn't do justice, what …


Bayh-Dole Reform And The Progress Of Biomedicine, Arti K. Rai, Rebecca S. Eisenberg Jan 2003

Bayh-Dole Reform And The Progress Of Biomedicine, Arti K. Rai, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

Advances in fundamental biomedical research play an important and growing role in the development of new therapeutic and diagnostic products. Although the development of pharmaceutical end products has long been a proprietary enterprise, biomedical research comes from a very different tradition of open science. Within this tradition, long-standing norms call for relatively unfettered access to fundamental knowledge developed by prior researchers. The tradition of open science has eroded considerably over the past quarter century as proprietary claims have reached farther upstream from end products to cover fundamental discoveries that provide the knowledge base for future product development.