--- title: "Drugmakers Have Tripled Their Patent Piles, and Generics Wait Longer for It" description: "A JAMA study finds the average small-molecule drug went from 2.1 patents in 1990 to 6.9 in 2019" author: "Nate Ledger" published: 2026-09-28T19:53:37Z modified: 2026-09-29T02:20:49Z url: https://rews.cc/a/drugmakers-have-tripled-their-patent-piles-and-generics-wait-1093e9 language: en tags: ["health", "patents", "pharma", "economy", "regulation"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Drugmakers Have Tripled Their Patent Piles, and Generics Wait Longer for It *A JAMA study finds the average small-molecule drug went from 2.1 patents in 1990 to 6.9 in 2019* By Nate Ledger · September 28, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/drugmakers-have-tripled-their-patent-piles-and-generics-wait-1093e9 ## In brief - JAMA study: average patents per small-molecule drug rose from 2.1 in 1990 to 6.9 in 2019 - Most growth came from “nonprimary” patents on inactive ingredients, uses and delivery devices - The average patented life of a drug stretched from two years in 1990 to 6.1 years in 2019 - Researchers say the findings likely understate thicket sizes; patent activity now runs up to nine years post-approval - Biologics were excluded because the FDA does not list them in a public database Here is a rough sketch of how the market for a prescription drug is supposed to work. A company spends a pile of money inventing a molecule, gets a patent on it, and enjoys a stretch of monopoly pricing as its reward. Then the patent expires, generic manufacturers show up, the price collapses, and everyone except the original company is better off. The monopoly is the payment for the invention; the expiration is the point. Here is how it increasingly works instead, according to a study published Monday in JAMA. The company invents the molecule and patents it, sure. But then it keeps patenting things around the molecule — tweaks to the inactive ingredients, new ways of using the drug, the design of the auto-injector it comes in — and each of those patents extends the period in which a generic competitor has to lawyer up before launching. Researchers led by S. Sean Tu, an expert in drug and patent law at the University of Alabama, found that the average small-molecule drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1990 carried 2.1 patents. By 2019, the average was 6.9. More than triple. Most of that growth came not from patents on the active ingredient — the actual invention, the thing the monopoly is theoretically paying for — but from what the researchers call “nonprimary” patents. Enough nonprimary patents on one drug and you get what’s known as a “patent thicket”: not one fence around the product but a dense undergrowth of them, each of which a would-be generic maker has to hack through or wait out. The effect, the study found, was to stretch the average time a drug remained under patent from two years in 1990 to 6.1 years in 2019. > Because patent protection typically determines how long brand-name firms can charge monopoly prices, the rapid growth of nonprimary patents may contribute to limited price competition that benefits patients and the health care system by helping avoid unnecessary spending That is Tu and his colleagues writing in JAMA, and you will note the dry academic construction doing a lot of work there: monopoly pricing, persisting longer thanks to patents that have nothing to do with new medicine, is framed as limiting the price competition that would benefit patients. Translate it out of journal-ese and you get: the thickets keep prices higher for longer, without any corresponding clinical advance. The extra patents are not extra invention. They are extra fence. The mechanics are worth pausing on, because the thicket’s genius — if you are the brand-name firm — is that no single patent has to be especially strong. A generic company can challenge a patent, and often does, but challenging seven patents is seven times the litigation, seven times the delay, and each year of delay is a year of monopoly pricing. Even patents that would lose in court can win on the calendar. Delay is the product. ## The true size of the thickets The study, as Ars Technica reports, used publicly available data on small-molecule drugs approved by the FDA between 1990 and 2019, categorizing the patents attached to each drug and how they affected its patented life. Biologics — the other, increasingly important category of medicines — were not included, because the FDA doesn’t systematically list them in a public database. The researchers allowed a five-year follow-up window after approval for patents to accumulate. Even so, the authors caution that their numbers probably understate how big thickets have become. Patent activity around a drug, they note, now stretches as far as nine years after FDA approval — meaning the companies have learned to keep filing, and keep fencing, long after the product launches. If you approved a drug in 2019, the patents catalogued by 2024 may not be the last word on it. The backdrop is that Americans pay more — often far more — for medicines than patients in comparable countries, for a whole grab-bag of reasons. Patent exploitation is only one of them. But it is an unusually legible one: the patent system exists to hand out temporary monopolies as prizes for invention, and what the JAMA data shows is an industry that has gotten very good at converting one prize into seven. The average drugmaker in 1990 needed a little over two patents per drug to protect its work. Its successor in 2019 needed almost seven, and was still finding things to patent nine years later. Either inventing got three times harder, or the fencing did. The study has a view on which.