Drug company fights for patent extension

The New York Times: The drug maker Medicines Company that makes the blood thinner called Angiomax, missed the application deadline to extend its patent back in 2000 by a day or two, depending on how you count. The patent is set to expire next Tuesday, instead of in 2014, and the company is doing everything it can to fix the mistake and save hundreds of millions of dollars in potential sales. Last Tuesday, a federal judge ordered the patent office to reconsider the application. "The ruling, by Judge Claude M. Hilton of the United States District Court in Alexandria, Va., also ordered the patent office to ensure that the Angiomax patent did not expire during the reconsideration period" (Pollack, 3/18).

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This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.