What Is an Orphan Drug?
© Copyright 1993 to the present, Oppedahl Patent Law Firm LLC. Disclaimer: This is not legal advice. Click for information on the purpose of this page. For a drug company, it is always desirable to have an exclusive market position. One way that a drug company can obtain an exclusive market position for a drug is to obtain a utility patent on the drug; the exclusivity lasts for the 17-year term of the patent. This is helpful only if the drug is a newly discovered substance, however. Thus, while the patent system provides an incentive to discover new substances with medicinal benefits, it provides less of an incentive to investigate possible benefits from the use of an old substance to treat a present-day health problem, since the old substance is not going to be patentable. One possibility is to secure method patent coverage on the newly discovered use of the old substance, but such coverage is often less strong than utility patent coverage on the substance itself. To provide an incent
