The idea of drug patents makes a lot of sense: The company that put the effort and resources into developing the medicine is the first to reap the benefits. That company gets a limited monopoly for 20 years, when it is the only company allowed to manufacture and sell that drug.

The deal is that after that patent expires, other companies can manufacture and sell the drug, too. The drug goes “generic.” Typically that means lower prices for patients - more people benefit. That’s how the system is supposed to work. 

But that system relies a lot on good faith - and many pharma companies have gotten very good at finding ways to extend that 20 years, making small tweaks to a drug to extend their monopoly for years.

Today, I hand Drug Story over to the excellent journalist Dan Weissmann, host of the NPR podcast An Arm and A Leg. In this episode of An Arm and a Leg, Dan talks with John Green - author of the new book, Everything is Tuberculosis. Green explains a very effective drug for TB was kept under patent protection for years, making it too expensive to treat millions of people with tuberculosis, leading to thousands of unnecessary deaths worldwide.

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