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The Shifting Landscape Of Medicine: Patents Of Personalized Biologic Treatments And Their Potential Conflicts With Right-To-Try Laws, Johnson T. Laney

Journal of Intellectual Property Law

The United States has gone back and forth over whether its citizens have a moral right to access potentially life sustaining or lifesaving treatment when they are terminally ill. Currently, forty-one states and the US Senate have passed "right to try" laws that permit terminally ill patients to have access to experimental treatments that have not yet received FDA approval. The United States has had a difficult time determining whether a patient has the right to refuse life-sustaining or lifesaving treatment because of fear that the patient is suicidal. The Supreme Court has addressed this problem and determined that the …