Patented drugs mean that drugs are protected by patents, and only companies that own these patented drugs can produce them or transfer them to others for production. Generic drugs generally refer to generic drugs. When the patent protection of drugs expires, all pharmaceutical companies can carry out legal production.
There is a famous "Double Ten" law in the medical field: it takes 65.438 billion dollars and 654.38+0 years to develop a new drug, and the initial investment cost is huge. Although the patent protection period of a new drug is 20 years, it needs to apply for patent protection in the early stage of drug research and development-the screening stage of candidate compounds, and the average profit dividend period after the final listing is less than 10 year. In order to balance the huge investment in the early stage, gain profits and the motivation to develop the next new drug, pharmaceutical companies must sell their patents at a high price during the patent period and make as much profit as possible. Once the patent period comes, the price of drugs will drop sharply.
For example, Gleevec in the movie "Dying for Survival" is a targeted drug for leukemia and is regarded as a milestone of targeted drugs. It took 50 years for this drug to be approved for marketing, which not only produced two "world firsts"-five American academicians and five Lasker prizes (the highest prize in American biomedicine), but also produced many important medical discoveries. There is a saying in the medical field that targeted drugs cost tens of thousands of yuan because you bought the second drug, and the price of the first drug is several billion, which shows that the research and development cost is huge. Another reason for the high cost of targeted drugs is that they are not "commonly used drugs", and the reduction of patient population will inevitably lead to the increase of cost sharing. Under the influence of these factors, the cost of anticancer drugs has become a burden for many patients.