Thread (1/14): Tomorrow, drugmakers will be testifying on the tactics the industry uses to prop up drug prices.

Let’s take a look at the story of a poster child of patent abuse: Celgene’s cancer drug Revlimid.

Currently, the list price for a 1-month supply of Revlimid is a staggering $22,314.

Revlimid is Celgene’s blockbuster moneymaker. In 2017, it brought in $8.1 billion — or 63% — of Celgene's revenue.

But, the real story of Revlimid starts back in the 1950s.

Revlimid began as the falsely proclaimed wonder drug Thalidomide, which was banished from the market in the early 60s after it was found to have devastating birth defects in the children of mothers who took it.

Thalidomide idled in the pharmaceutical archives for decades until in the early 90s AIDS researchers found it boosted part of the immune system.

Seeing an opportunity, drugmaker Celgene acquired Thalidomide and retooled it as Thalomid, a treatment for leprosy. Soon after, it used Thalidomide as a template to create Revlimid, a treatment for multiple myeloma, a rare form of blood cancer.

Now, in theory, our patent system exists to incentivize these types of breakthroughs by rewarding drugmakers like Celgene with a time-limited monopoly for their invention.

But drugmakers recognize that the system can be easily gamed, and if done so successfully, can be used to construct impenetrable patent walls around drugs that make it all but impossible for competitors to enter the market.

Celgene and its battalion of lawyers know this well. The main patent on lenalidomide (the active ingredient in Revlimid) expired in 2019, so to maintain their monopoly they got creative...

Recall, Revlimid is a relative of Thalidomide. Because of this, Celgene was required to create a patient safety programme (REMS). The programme includes videos and written materials for patients, protocols for doctors and pharmacies, and birth control requirements for women.

While intended as a way to protect patients, Celgene found a way to use this REMS programme to exploit them...

By filing a myriad of patent apps on its REMS programme, which competitors must use if they want to distribute an alternative, Celgene found a way to maintain its monopoly for decades after the expiration of its original patents.

To date, there are a staggering 196 patent apps on Revlimid. The 109 granted patents for Revlimid give Celgene over 42 years of patent protection. Remember, patent protection should only last for 20 years on an invention.

Egregious overpatenting should not be tolerated. Drugmakers like Celgene have gamed our patent system to monopolize life-saving medicines.

Yet while Celgene must be held accountable, the human and financial costs of this behaviour have already been incurred.

We have to ask the hard question: why does our patent system allow this in the first place?