How to survive the patent cliff

29 January 2012

This year $50 billion worth of drugs come off patent. The pharma industry’s response will be to focus on personalised medicine and biologics. Eileen McDermott explains how this will shift IP strategy towards trade secrets, data and patenting processes

Two months ago, Lipitor, a drug that has been prescribed to 17 million people with high cholesterol, lost its patent. That patent gave Pfizer exclusive rights to the drug's $10.7 billion in sales in 2010 alone – more than the gross GDP of 70 of the world's countries that year. It is the best-selling drug to go off-patent so far, and the pharmaceutical industry – which is facing $50 billion in losses globally due to patent expirations in 2012 – will be looking to Pfizer to see how the company copes. "The textbook is going to be rewritten in the next six months thanks to Lipitor," says Chris Paddison, vice president at management consultant firm AT Kearney.

Almost every major drug company is facing the expiration of a blockbuster drug patent. And the pipelines are not promising. "For investors, there's a real dearth of pipeline success," says one healthcare portfolio manager at...

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