The line dividing makers of brand-name drugs and copycat medicines is blurring as companies known for innovative treatments queue up to peddle copies of rivals’ complex biological medicines.
These drugmakers are now increasingly straddling both sides of the courtroom, too, protecting their high-price products from biosimilars - biopharmaceutical drugs with the treatment properties of medicines they seek to mimic - while simultaneously challenging rivals’ patent claims.
Biologics, manufactured in living cells, then extracted and purified, are more complex than traditional medicines and cannot be copied with precision, and so their knock-off versions are called biosimilars instead of generics.
