Truth on the Market

Last week, Senator Orrin Hatch, Senator Thom Tillis, and Representative Bill Flores introduced the Hatch-Waxman Integrity Act of 2018 (HWIA) in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.  If enacted, the HWIA would help to ensure that the unbalanced inter partes review (IPR) process does not stifle innovation in the drug industry and jeopardize patients’ access to life-improving drugs.

Created under the America Invents Act of 2012, IPR is a new administrative pathway for challenging patents. It was, in large part, created to fix the problem of patent trolls in the IT industry; the trolls allegedly used questionable or “low quality” patents to extort profits from innovating companies.  IPR created an expedited pathway to challenge patents of dubious quality, thus making it easier for IT companies to invalidate low quality patents.

However, IPR is available for patents in any industry, not just the IT industry.  In the market for drugs, IPR offers an alternative to the litigation pathway that Congress created over three decades ago in the Hatch-Waxman Act. Although IPR seemingly fixed a problem that threatened innovation in the IT industry, it created a new problem that directly threatened innovation in the drug industry. I’ve previously published an article explaining why IPR jeopardizes drug innovation and consumers’ access to life-improving drugs. With Hatch-Waxman, Congress sought to achieve a delicate balance between stimulating innovation from brand drug companies, who hold patents, and facilitating market entry from generic drug companies, who challenge the patents.  However, IPR disrupts this balance as critical differences between IPR proceedings and Hatch-Waxman litigation clearly tilt the balance in the patent challengers’ favor. In fact, IPR has produced noticeably anti-patent results; patents are twice as likely to be found invalid in IPR challenges as they are in Hatch-Waxman litigation.

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) applies a lower standard of proof for invalidity in IPR proceedings than do federal courts in Hatch-Waxman proceedings. In federal court, patents are presumed valid and challengers must prove each patent claim invalid by “clear and convincing evidence.” In IPR proceedings, no such presumption of validity applies and challengers must only prove patent claims invalid by the “preponderance of the evidence.”

Moreover, whereas patent challengers in district court must establish sufficient Article III standing, IPR proceedings do not have a standing requirement.  This has given rise to “reverse patent trolling,” in which entities that are not litigation targets, or even participants in the same industry, threaten to file an IPR petition challenging the validity of a patent unless the patent holder agrees to specific pre-filing settlement demands.  The lack of a standing requirement has also led to the  exploitation of the IPR process by entities that would never be granted standing in traditional patent litigation—hedge funds betting against a company by filing an IPR challenge in hopes of crashing the stock and profiting from the bet.

Finally, patent owners are often forced into duplicative litigation in both IPR proceedings and federal court litigation, leading to persistent uncertainty about the validity of their patents.  Many patent challengers that are unsuccessful in invalidating a patent in district court may pursue subsequent IPR proceedings challenging the same patent, essentially giving patent challengers “two bites at the apple.”  And if the challenger prevails in the IPR proceedings (which is easier to do given the lower standard of proof), the PTAB’s decision to invalidate a patent can often “undo” a prior district court decision.  Further, although both district court judgments and PTAB decisions are appealable to the Federal Circuit, the court applies a more deferential standard of review to PTAB decisions, increasing the likelihood that they will be upheld compared to the district court decision.

The pro-challenger bias in IPR creates significant uncertainty for patent rights in the drug industry.  As an example, just last week patent claims for drugs generating $6.5 billion for drug company Sanofi were invalidated in an IPR proceeding.  Uncertain patent rights will lead to less innovation because drug companies will not spend the billions of dollars it typically costs to bring a new drug to market when they cannot be certain if the patents for that drug can withstand IPR proceedings that are clearly stacked against them.   And, if IPR causes drug innovation to decline, a significant body of research predicts that patients’ health outcomes will suffer as a result.

The HWIA, which applies only to the drug industry, is designed to return the balance established by Hatch-Waxman between branded drug innovators and generic drug challengers. It eliminates challengers’ ability to file duplicative claims in both federal court and through the IPR process. Instead, they must choose between either Hatch-Waxman litigation (which saves considerable costs by allowing generics to rely on the brand company’s safety and efficacy studies for FDA approval) and IPR (which is faster and provides certain pro-challenger provisions). In addition to eliminating generic challengers’ “second bite of the apple,” the HWIA would also eliminate the ability of hedge funds and similar entities to file IPR claims while shorting the stock.

Thus, if enacted, the HWIA would create incentives that reestablish Hatch-Waxman litigation as the standard pathway for generic challenges to brand patents.  Yet, it would preserve IPR proceedings as an option when speed of resolution is a primary concern.  Ultimately, it will restore balance to the drug industry to safeguard competition, innovation, and patients’ access to life-improving drugs.