Bipartisan group of lawmakers seeks to reign in pharma patent thickets with new bill

Sen­a­tors on both sides of the aisle are seek­ing to ease mar­ket en­try for gener­ics and biosim­i­lars with a new bill that would cre­ate guardrails around patent thick­ets, or a con­glom­er­a­tion of patents that cov­er a sin­gle prod­uct and were most fa­mous­ly used to ex­tend the mo­nop­oly of Ab­b­Vie’s block­buster Hu­mi­ra (adal­i­mum­ab).

The leg­is­la­tion would re­strict the num­ber of patents com­pa­nies can as­sert in lit­i­ga­tion. It would al­so pro­hib­it patent own­ers from as­sert­ing more than one patent from the same patent group in sep­a­rate ac­tions against the same al­leged in­fringer.

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