A study of US patents related to AIDS medication Roger Kang, Dora P.C. Lee, and William W.L. Chen
Continuous research and technological innovation are crucial
to sustainable business in many industries, especially, in pharmaceutical industry,
it takes a long time and many stages to develop a new drug. However, the possibility
for successfully developing a new drug is quite low. Generally speaking, if there
are 5,000 to 10,000 compounds being studied initially, probably only one drug
is approved by FDA to enter the market. Whether one stage can smoothly proceed
depends on the result of its previous stage and no one can ensure that technologies
or results developed in the previous stage can be successfully applied in the
next one. Since developing new drugs is a high-risk investment, it is important
to "secure" the developed technologies or results, no matter by filing patents
to exclude competitors from entering the market, or by licensing those developed
technologies out for profit. Technology transfer or patent licensing activity,
therefore, has been substantially grown in pharmaceutical industry and then how
to evaluate pharmaceutical-related patent or technology plays the key role in
such business transaction.
