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

And then I can also formulate it so that when I release it, when I launch the product with its first form, it might be an intravenous form.

And then I can switch it to an injectable form.

And that adds on new life to the patent.

Now, the argument from the industry is, well, eventually the patent on the original form will run out so that competitors can use that.

But the market is much more complicated than that because what companies do is they switch patients onto the new form.

And so the clock restarts again and the monopoly restarts again.

A great example of that is the cancer drug Keytruda, which is on the market, one of the best-selling drugs ever.

And what Merck has done is they've now launched an injectable form of the drug.

It's previously delivered in an IV form.

So now they're trying to switch the whole market over to the injectable form before its patents run out.

So then they've got a new level of protection around the injectable form, and then the clock restarts, and they've basically cannibalized any market that might exist for any competitor coming in.

There is a limit to the active ingredient that a company can apply for.

So you get the original patent, which covers the active ingredient.

But beyond that, there is no limit on the variations you can file patents for.

There are an endless, there's a whole menu of variations you can apply patents for.

And this is why companies can rack up anywhere up to $300

And then the upshot is that this prevents cheaper generics from going to market, right?

Absolutely.

What ends up playing out is companies, competitors have to then litigate through all these patents because inevitably it's going to become a litigation game.

So think about it this way.

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