Navigating a storm that threatens American biotechnology

The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act last week is an important milestone in the history of American biotechnology. I’ve been honored to participate in that history from a variety of perspectives: White House adviser, congressional staff, senior biotech executive, public company board member, lawyer, and venture capital investor.

Those experiences shape the lens through which I view the industry’s evolution and its future. Over the past four decades, our freedom to innovate has been underpinned by — and helped create — a marketplace that was open enough to fully reward risk-taking investors devoting capital to cutting edge science. And so I am disappointed by the new law’s price-setting provisions and market distortions. But I remain optimistic about the ability of modern bioscience to deliver new treatments and cures.

The arc of the industry’s progress bends toward access and availability to new medicines for patients. Going forward, modest changes to these new regulations can ensure that progress continues. In the 1980s, the early days of my career, there was no viable domestic process for enforcing process patents and no international standard for protecting pharmaceutical innovation. Patent life was shortened by a slow, unfocused regulatory review process. No meaningful generic drug industry existed, and inventors…