"A bill to overhaul the patent system that is before the Senate contains a provision that could get an influential law firm off the hook for a possible $214 million malpractice payment.
J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
“The key question is whether we will vote to bail out a law firm that made a mistake and now wants consumers and taxpayers to pay the freight for that error,” said Senator Jeff Sessions, above, and Senator Tom Coburn, in a letter to colleagues.
The provision clarifies how much time pharmaceutical companies have to apply for patent extensions that can provide extra years of protection from generic competition.
But critics, who have labeled the provision “The Dog Ate My Homework Act,” say it is really a special fix for one drug manufacturer, the Medicines Company, and its powerful law firm, WilmerHale. The company and its law firm, with hundreds of millions of dollars in drug sales at stake, lobbied Congress heavily for several years to get the patent laws changed.
The patent office initially said that the company had missed the deadline for applying for a patent extension by a day or two, potentially losing nearly four years of patent protection on its main drug, the anticoagulant Angiomax. The provision would guarantee that the Medicines Company got the extra patent protection, and it would relieve WilmerHale, which was hired to file the application, of a possible malpractice payment to its client.
On Thursday, the Senate is scheduled to vote on an amendment proposed by Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, that would strip the provision from the bill. “The key question is whether we will vote to bail out a law firm that made a mistake and now wants consumers and taxpayers to pay the freight for that error,” Senator Sessions and Senator Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, said in a letter sent Wednesday to colleagues. They said the extra patent protection on Angiomax could cost hospitals and consumers $1 billion."