Word: patentable
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...keeping with the new emphasis on marketing, libraries are increasingly providing services to businesses. The Louisville public library, for example, has its own patent collection. A dozen facilities around the country advise small firms on how to win federal contracts. Last July the Los Angeles Public Library introduced FYI, a fee-based research and document-service that gives businesses access to 1,500 on-line data bases and a national library network. Once the desired information is located, researchers fax or hand-deliver it right to a client's desk...
...medication in the 1970s to $125 million today. Regulatory agencies like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration can take up to seven years to approve a drug application. That shrinks to 14 years the maximum amount of time in which a company can recoup its investment before its patent on a new substance runs out, and thereby pressures the firm to hike the price...
...attempt to defuse the drug-price crisis in 1984 when legislators passed the Waxman-Hatch Drug Act, designed to encourage companies to manufacture more non-brand-name versions of prescription drugs. Pharmaceutical firms may sell these so-called generic drugs only after the brand name has lost its patent protection. The 1984 law streamlined the FDA approval process for generic drugs, reducing the time from an average of three years to a few months. Manufacturer sales of the low-cost drugs thereupon leaped from $3.5 billion in 1984 to $7 billion...
After a medication has lost its patent protection, many companies raise the price to recoup some of the losses caused by the immediate drop in market share. A company can forfeit as much as 30% of that share in the first year after generic substitutes become available, but many physicians continue to prescribe only the brand-name medications they have come to trust and rely on. When generic versions of the potent heart medication Dyazide were introduced in the mid-1980s, the drug's inventor, SmithKline Beckman, raised the compound's price...
...they need the money to keep the all-important R.- and-D. well from running dry. In the past, one good blockbuster chemical -- a drug that generates more than $500 million in sales annually -- could finance a company's investigations for years. But as research becomes more complicated, the patented blockbusters are proving harder to come by. "By 1992 half of the top-ten-selling drugs in the U.S. will be off-patent," says Nomura's Silverman. "By 1995 almost all of them will be off-patent." And that will force less innovative pharmaceutical companies to raise prices...