> Generic lenacapavir can’t be sold in the U.S. because a brand-name version, Yeztugo, made by Gilead Sciences and approved last year, is still protected by a patent.
> AbbVie was granted many additional (late-stage) patents on Humira, including patents on methods for manufacturing, its formulation, and potential future formulations. AbbVie applied for approximately 247 patents, of which 132 were granted, creating a “patent thicket” protecting Humira from competition until 2037 (when the last patent will expire). Notably, 90 percent of these patent filings were after Humira was already on the market, and almost half were filed in 2014 or later, in advance of the expiration of its core patent ‘382.
Generic "biosimilar" versions of adalimumab were available in the EU by 2018, when the EU-specific patents expired, but they weren't available in the US until 2023. And even that required the companies who make biosimilars for the US market to pay royalties to AbbVie, and that was the better possible outcome than actually waiting until 2037 for all the patents to fully expire.
> Generic lenacapavir can’t be sold in the U.S. because a brand-name version, Yeztugo, made by Gilead Sciences and approved last year, is still protected by a patent.
If you want to learn more about the kind of stunts that companies pull with patents, here's a great/terrible case study: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4215822
> AbbVie was granted many additional (late-stage) patents on Humira, including patents on methods for manufacturing, its formulation, and potential future formulations. AbbVie applied for approximately 247 patents, of which 132 were granted, creating a “patent thicket” protecting Humira from competition until 2037 (when the last patent will expire). Notably, 90 percent of these patent filings were after Humira was already on the market, and almost half were filed in 2014 or later, in advance of the expiration of its core patent ‘382.
Generic "biosimilar" versions of adalimumab were available in the EU by 2018, when the EU-specific patents expired, but they weren't available in the US until 2023. And even that required the companies who make biosimilars for the US market to pay royalties to AbbVie, and that was the better possible outcome than actually waiting until 2037 for all the patents to fully expire.