Biden Is Medical Innovation's Executioner

President Joe Biden just declared war on medical science — and has undermined his "Cancer Moonshot."

That's the only way to interpret the administration's announcement last week arrogating the power to seize patents for medicines and other technologies developed with taxpayer funds on the grounds that they're too expensive.

The president claims the new policy serves the interest of patients. But that's false. Patents are an indispensable tool for encouraging the invention of all manner of technology, including life-saving medicines.

By claiming the right to break patents unilaterally, the administration has all but guaranteed a future in which breakthroughs in treating cancer, Alzheimer's, and countless other debilitating conditions are far less common. And it's putting public health at immeasurable risk.

The policy shift exploits a provision in the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act. The law helped make it possible for private companies to license patents that resulted from federally funded basic research conducted by universities in order to create commercial products. Bayh-Dole has made America the global leader in drug development.

The law also empowered the federal government to invalidate or "march in" on patents in very limited circumstances.

Consider a company that licensed a patent that resulted from taxpayer-funded research — and then proved unable or unwilling to commercialize the research behind that patent. In this instance, the government would be justified in relicensing the patent to another company that could commercialize that invention.

The circumstances that might warrant such a patent seizure have nothing to do with the price of the product based on that patent. For more than four decades, the federal government has never used march-in rights.

The Biden administration wants to change all that. Under a new framework, the federal government will now consider revoking a patent in the name of reducing the price of any drug or other invention that benefited from federal support.

In so doing, it has thrown the entire enterprise of developing a drug — or potentially any other technology — into jeopardy.

Developing a new medicine and bringing it to market takes an average of nearly $3 billion and 10 to 15 years. For such massive investments of time and money to be worthwhile, companies need assurance that they'll have the chance to earn back that outlay. Patents provide that assurance by insulating a new drug from generic competition for at least a few years.

A standard patent lasts 20 years from filing. But given the timeline for developing drugs, a patent holder's period of market exclusivity may be much shorter.

If pharmaceutical companies lose confidence in the enforceability of patents, the incentive to develop cutting-edge treatments leveraging federally funded research would evaporate. Medical progress would stall.

And patients in the United States and around the world would lose out on the kinds of life-saving advances only the American drug industry is equipped to provide.

The president has framed this imperious move as a means of lowering the cost of health care — ignoring the fact that prescription drugs are among our health system's most powerful tools for containing medical spending.

Research published last month by Columbia University scholar Frank Lichtenberg found that "the diseases for which the most new drugs were approved by the FDA tended to have lower growth in overall healthcare costs and, in particular, hospital costs."

In other words, as Lichtenberg put it, "new drugs often reduce the need for people to be hospitalized for different conditions." And hospitalization can be a lot more expensive than a daily pill.

A policy that reduces the number of new drugs in the future is likely to drive up overall health spending in the long run while also hurting patient outcomes.

The Biden administration is on the cusp of doing irreparable harm to America's innovation ecosystem. The president is setting the stage for intellectual property theft on a massive scale. And he has paved the way for a future with fewer new cures and more needless suffering.