The Case for Reforming Drug Naming: Should Brand Name Trademark Protections Expire upon Generic Entry?

Ameet Sarpatwari; Aaron S Kesselheim

doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001955

The Case for Reforming Drug Naming: Should Brand Name Trademark Protections Expire upon Generic Entry?

PLoS Med. 2016 Feb 9;13(2):e1001955. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1001955. eCollection 2016 Feb.

Authors

Ameet Sarpatwari¹, Aaron S Kesselheim¹

Affiliation

¹ Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL), Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America.

Abstract

Ameet Sarpatwari and Aaron Kesselheim explore whether stripping branded drugs of trademark protection would improve the efficiency and fairness of health care.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Review

MeSH terms

Costs and Cost Analysis
Drug Costs*
Drug Industry / methods*
Drugs, Generic*
Economic Competition*
Humans
Patents as Topic / statistics & numerical data*

Substances

Drugs, Generic

Grants and funding

This work was supported in part by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Public Health Law Research program. ASK is a Greenwall Faculty Scholar in Bioethics and is supported by the Harvard Program in Therapeutic Science. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.