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Full-Text Articles in Food and Drug Law
Ignoring Drug Trademarks, Erika Lietzan
Ignoring Drug Trademarks, Erika Lietzan
Faculty Publications
If you walk into a pharmacy with a prescription for Merck’s ZOCOR, which contains simvastatin, the pharmacist will probably give you a product containing simvastatin made by another company. The pharmacist will dispense a “generic” simvastatin product. State generic substitution laws, passed in the 1970s to help the government save money by switching patients to cheaper generic drugs, either permit or require this substitution. But drug brand names -- such as ZOCOR -- are trademarks. Like other trademarks, they distinguish goods in the market from others, and they signal the source of the goods. These state laws essentially treat the …
Distorted Drug Patents, Erika Lietzan
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 …
Generic Competition And Pharmaceutical Innovation: The Drug Price Competition And Patent Term Restoration Act Of 1984, James J. Wheaton
Generic Competition And Pharmaceutical Innovation: The Drug Price Competition And Patent Term Restoration Act Of 1984, James J. Wheaton
Faculty Publications
This article critiques the Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act of 1984. Part I traces the background of the two major sections of the Act by examining the recent trend toward generic competition in the pharmaceutical industry and the need perceived by some industry observers for additional incentives to pharmaceutical research. Part II of the article describes and discusses the sections of the Act designed to benefit the two segments of the pharmaceutical industry. Part III addresses the likely effect of the Act on generic competition, and Part IV provides a parallel analysis for the research-intensive pharmaceutical firms. …