THE FUTURE OF PATENTS IN THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY
AUTHOR – RANJAN KUMAR, STUDENT AT AMITY LAW SCHOOL, PATNA
BEST CITATION – RANJAN KUMAR, THE FUTURE OF PATENTS IN THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY, INDIAN JOURNAL OF LEGAL REVIEW (IJLR), 5 (14) OF 2025, PG. 428-432, APIS – 3920 – 0001 & ISSN – 2583-2344.
ABSTRACT
The future of pharmaceuticals will be driven by a number of factors, including rapid scientific innovations, new biotechnology developments, and global priorities related to health care. As a result, traditional patent laws—the foundation for protecting new discoveries and products—are undergoing increasing scrutiny as the pharmaceutical industry faces more and more challenges internally and externally. This paper will assess what the future will look like with respect to patents in pharmaceuticals by examining some of the major issues facing the industry today—high research & development costs, patent cliffs, the always-present issue of evergreening, and the unequal access to life-saving medicines between middle-income and low-income countries—as well as the potential of new regulatory models (such as data exclusivity, compulsory licensing, open-science drug discovery, and international regulatory harmonization) to alleviate these challenges. Furthermore, this paper will assess the impact of technological advancements (such as AI and personalized medicine) on the patentability and enforcement of new pharmaceutical inventions, as well as the potential effects of these advancements on pharmaceutical markets.
Overall, the findings presented in this paper point to the need for an adaptive/escrow-system patent model that provides the necessary incentives for innovation while simultaneously providing access to necessary therapies for all individuals, particularly to those in low- and middle-income countries, by means of co-operative governance between multiple health care systems. The findings indicate that the long-term growth of both science and public health will depend on partnerships between government, industry, and academia, working together as collaborative remonstrators of “hybrid innovation”