I was listening to a podcast (Search Engine) about the illegal use of fentanyl, and they mentioned that when it was made illegal (I forget which country), the illegal drug producers altered the molecule just enough to still have the same effect but get around the law. It became a cat and mouse game.
Do pharmaceutical companies do this with commercial drugs? I don’t remember this being done with any popular drugs, and it always seems that they have to wait for patents to expire then it is sold as a generic. Do drug patents register a chemical? The process for producing that chemical? Something else?
I no longer spend much time thinking about the pharmaceutical industry, but until someone with more current knowledge stops by:
All of the above. A composition of matter protects production and use of a drug; it can also cover a class or an antibody clone. Drug targets are patentable but IIRC there are some limits that I’m not going to be able to clarify for you. Something something about Cox-2 inhibitors.
Drug companies do this in order to keep drugs under patent. For example loratadine (Claritin) fell off patent protection in 2002 but desloratadine (New! Improved) which is marketed as Clarinex was released in 2004. It is a more active metabolite of the same base molecule.
Companies also do this with things like extended release formulations to keep the patent train rolling.
I don’t know about pharmaceuticals, but I know pesticide manufacturers have done it for decades. Propachlor was introduced in 1965,. It gave birth to alachlor, butachlor, acetochlor, and probably a few other -chlors I’m not aware of.
A bit of both. Identifying the chemical structure is preferred, but some things can’t be described that way very easily, so they patent the process to make it.
As to the original question, lots of patents for drugs and chemicals recite a laundry list of possible variations, so that any similar-but-not-quite substances are covered by the patent. They’ll also identify a particularly useful version, which is the one they plan to commercially exploit.
A lot of the patents that extend coverage for a drug are “selection patents”. The original patent covered a lot of generic versions, but then they identify a subset of those versions that show some new, unexpected additional use/value, and so get a patent for that narrower selection.
Things that the sellers claim are Viagra are sold for pennies per pill online. Do you trust that what they’re selling is real? Or that, once they have your credit card number, they won’t drain you dry?
I have heard this claim many times, but I don’t believe it. A patent on an improved invention does not extend the patent on the original invention. There are many brands of loratadine now, sold by several different pharmaceutical companies. The Schering-Plough Corporation may have extended their market dominance by patenting something a little better than loratadine, but that didn’t prevent their competitors from marketing their own loratadine once the original patents expired.
I suspect the notion of continual updating of patents is referring to the now dead idea of submarine patents. There, so long as the patent was never actually issued, it was possible to extend its reach by filing additional applications. Thus keeping the IP effectively locked from others for near arbitrary time.
Since US patents now run from date of filing rather than issuing this is no longer a thing.
This is true, but what is also true is that marketing works. Lots of people won’t want to use the “old” drug if there’s a “new and improved” drug out there.