Key drugs losing patent protection in 2025
…and you don’t believe big pharma has been in deep trouble for that last two decades?
Check these out
Key drugs losing patent protection in 2025
United States: These 38 Drugs Face Patent Expirations and Generic Entry From 2025 - 2026 DrugPatentWatch® Estimated Loss of Exclusivity Dates in the United States
The fact is, the big pharma gravy train coming to an end has been a well kept secret for many a year - SARS-CoV-2 were last chance saloon…
getting it now?
Good, hope they go broke.
It’s a failed industry. I sensed it as early as 1989, when an older & wiser friend waved at all the buildings on the Wellcome Research site in U.K., where we both worked, and asked “What is keeping all this up, do you think?”
We had many long conversations about the state of the industry. We realised that nobody had any idea where new drug concepts came from and that attempts to “Scale the Discovery Engine” through sequential mergers was only having the effect of combining in-line product portfolios and late stage R&D pipelines, only a few of which would ever reach the market and most of those wouldn’t recover their R&D costs.
All sorts of bad behaviour was incentivised by limitations of commercial exclusivity which patents provide those who disclose an invention (which must be novel, useful & not obvious). The longer the development process became & the greater the costs, needed to exclude rare serious adverse effects and to prove superiority over existing, usually cheap, off-patent products, the shorter the useful exclusive period became, until it was too short to allow even the rare, good product that was a worthwhile advance over prior art to yield a sustaining profit.
I was clear by around the age of 40 (turn of the century) that I’d be extremely fortunate if the industry lasted long enough to retire out of it.
By my early 50s I, like tens of thousands of other people, was made redundant in a yet another merger & radical downsizing.
Luckily, I had a few accidental aces up my sleeve. Earlier than most, I’d invested much unrewarded effort in seeking out early stage drugs owned by much smaller companies which might provide the basis for commercial synergies. One in particular made many billions in revenue for both parties and was the most valuable thing I ever did.
These efforts brought me into contact with an ecosystem I was not even really aware of. Small start ups funded by private venture capital. I reviewed over 100 such entities. We did two deals.
After the announcement of the closure of the site at which I worked, I received two calls, independently from people whose biotechs I had previously reviewed and this launched me into consulting.
At dinner for one client, I met an investor who was curious about what was happening to all the portfolio I had worked on. Learning that most of all of it was to be abandoned in cost saving and downsizing, he asserted that i could raise a little capital & perhaps spin out some compounds. A year later, I did just that. For six years I led that biotech until acquisition by a big company & I entered into partial retirement in 2017 (also coinciding with a serious illness).
Then 2020 hit.
I could not take a commission to consult in this industry now. I’ve learned too many things of which I was previously completely unaware, beavering away in research labs. I also wouldn’t recommend anyone follow in my footsteps. That geography no longer exists.