Tahir Amin

speaker

103 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 6 Jul

Tahir Amin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Science Friday · How the US patent system keeps drug prices high · 6 Jul 2026 podcast

Thank you, Flora.

Thanks for having me.

So the patent system was created to incentivize invention.

And so the incentive was you come up with a new novel invention, something that is not obvious to somebody in that field.

Obviously, you invest some of your time and money into that.

And then the system provides you with a limited time of exclusivity.

So what you have now is a system where from a date of filing a patent, you get 20 years of exclusivity.

The problem is today, pharmaceutical companies and other companies in different fields have worked out that I can actually have overlapping patents that extend that period of protection in order to keep competition out.

So for example, yeah.

So if I've come up with an invention for a compound that goes to make the actual product, the medicine, we call it the active ingredient, let's say.

It gives the sort of curative effect or the therapeutic effect.

And then what I do then is, oh, well, I need to, if I'm a company, I need to then get this drug into the body.

So I'll come up with a formulation.

And then I realized this drug can also be used on several different indications, different conditions.

So for example, I know the mechanism of action of the molecule can be used to treat, let's say, inflammation.

So I will test it on all the different types of inflammation.

It's the same drug.

But each time I get an FDA approval,

For each of those conditions, I get a separate patent.

And this then adds on the layers.

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