I’ve been following the trials and tribulations of the Free Trade Agreement, and was wondering exactly what “evergreening” means. I found this defintion, through the cunning strategy of typing “evergreening” into my shiny new Google search bar:
One form of evergreening occurs when the originator manufacturer “stockpiles” patent protection by obtaining separate 20-year patents on multiple attributes of a single product. But many other evergreening strategies exist…
- The European Generic medicines Association
Apparently, in the U.S. – and in Australia, after we “harmonize” our patent laws – a company can take out separate patents on 18 different aspects of a single medication. The result is a legal tangle that makes manufacture of generic medicines risky and expensive.
Comments
Unless you're in India, in which case you can ignore the patents altogether, copy the drug, and then sell it across most of the world at a significant profit. ;-)