Patent cliff

What actually happens to the price

“The price falls” is easy to say. Here is the measured version: across drugs that went from a single manufacturer to two or more since 2019, the typical price fell to 72% of what it was about 2–3 years later. In every window measured, roughly 7 in 10 of the drugs were cheaper than they had been before competition arrived.

How to read the chart: each row is a window of time aftercompetition began, and the bar shows the typical drug's price then, as a percentage of its own price before competition. A row reading “1–6 mo · 93%” means that in the first six months the typical drug still cost 93% of its old price — the fall starts slowly, then compounds down the chart as more competitors arrive.

Bars show the median price as a share of the pre-competition price, so shorter is cheaper. Each window rests on 74–98 molecules — enough to show the shape, not enough to predict any single drug. Only drugs sold through retail pharmacy appear at all, since that is what NADAC prices.

Brands losing their last listed protection

Each row is one Orange Book application; the date is the latest expiration across all its listed patents and exclusivity periods. “Patents only” shows the classic cliff — brands whose final protection is a listed patent; “all protections” adds brands whose last shield is a regulatory exclusivity period FDA granted at approval (new chemical entity, orphan drug, new clinical study, or a pediatric add-on).