https://www.arnoldventures.org/stories/evergreening-stunts-competition-costs-consumers-and-taxpayers

Revlimid is a case study in a process known as “evergreening” — artificially sustaining a monopoly for years and even decades by manipulating intellectual property laws and regulations. Evergreening is most commonly used with blockbuster drugs generating the highest prices and profits. Of the roughly 100 best-selling drugs, more than 70 percent have extended their protection from competition at least once. More than half have extended the protection cliff multiple times.

The true scope and cost of evergreening has been brought into sharper focus by a groundbreaking, publicly available, comprehensive database released Thursday by the Center for Innovation at the University of California Hastings College of Law and supported by Arnold Ventures.

The Evergreen Drug Patent Search is the first database to exhaustively track the patent protections filed by pharmaceutical companies. Using data from 2005 to 2018 on brand-name drugs listed in the FDA’s Orange Book — a listing of relevant patents for brand name, small molecule drugs — it demonstrates the full extent of how evergreening has been used by Big Pharma to prolong patents and delay the entry of generic, lower-cost competition.

“Competition is the backbone of the U.S. economy,” said Professor Robin Feldman, Director of the UC Hastings Center for Innovation, who spearheaded the database’s creation. “But it’s not what we’re seeing in the drug industry.

“With evergreening, pharmaceutical companies repeatedly make slight, often trivial, modifications to drugs, dosage levels, delivery systems or other aspects to obtain new protections,” she said. “They pile these protections on over and over again — so often that 78 percent of the drugs associated with new patents were not new drugs coming on the market, but existing drugs.”