Should consumers care about biotech patents?

If you ask anyone at a pharmacy or clinic waiting room, most just don't have a thought about pharmaceutical patents.

They may care about price, about whether they can easily buy a drug or medicine at their local pharmacy, and how much they'll need to buy according to their prescription, but very little about trademarks, patents, and intellectual property.

Why should a consumer endorse what we would otherwise consider a "temporary monopoly for selling a drug" for one producer? If you are not a shareholder or employee of the patent holder, there's little reason to care.

But what if the existence of those patents in the biotech sector, and among all pharmaceuticals, was necessary for innovation in the first place?

The story changes when you ask yourself whether any drug would have been invented if the hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars that went into discovering and refining it, could not be recouped after successful market approval.

This is not just about discovering something that might cure a disease or help you lose weight. It is also about testing the new drug in the lab, on animals, and, in a later stage, on humans to determine that it is relatively safe to take.

These are the steps in the drug chain that we often take for granted, and that usually eat up most of the cost of developing a new drug. And that matters a lot more today as the cost of doing practically anything in the health space are falling.

Biohackers Rejoice

Let's look at the enthusiasm for biohacking.

On the one hand, it shows how hard we are all striving to improve our own bodies. That's a stellar and positive change. On the other, it shows how relatively easily it can be to get drugs onto the markets, whether legal or not, far beyond the trusted supply chains and testing protocols we rely on for name brand medicines. Many of the compounds involved are peptides, basically signaling molecules, a family that also includes the widely used insulin and GLP-1 drugs.

BPC-157, for example, is one of the most popular among biohackers, fitness influencers, and gym bros. But no published human trial has ever been completed on it. It is thought to work partly by stimulating the growth of new blood vessels, also how tumors secure their blood supply. FDA reviewers flagged exactly that when an advisory panel voted, narrowly and against their own scientists' advice, to let compounding pharmacies make it.

Does something I swallow or inject into me maybe increase the risk of cancer tumors growing faster? For most of these compounds, nobody can answer that.

The trade goes on regardless. US customs data show imports of hormone and peptide compounds from China doubling to $328 million in the first three quarters of 2025.

There are steps to reschedule several peptides so that physicians can legally prescribe them through so-called compounding pharmacies. This might help steer patients away from the grey and black markets for GLP-1 knockoffs, fakes, and peptides. It will also reduce the number of bad actors who don't care whether they sell contaminated or mislabeled products that directly put patients in danger. That's an important step.

Consumers should have the right to inject into their bodies what they decide for themselves. At the same time, it is important to have a clear awareness of what is deemed safe, what is medically promising but not yet proven, and what is outright harmful. And this doesn't necessarily need to come from government labs or agencies, but it is useful information for patients to have in the marketplace.

Many peptides in the biohacking community are often not patented, or their patents have already expired. That may make them affordable both to consume and produce, but it also means there is little to no financial incentive to conduct the long, expensive studies needed to establish their safety and efficacy. That matters.

The good thing about approved and clinically tested drugs is the amount of data we have: we know who can take them, how much, and what contraindications might be.

The GLP-1 drugs Semaglutide and tirzepatide are peptides too, and we know how they behave in millions of bodies because someone held a patent worth spending billions to defend.

Patented peptides are not safer than the vials sold online because of their chemistry. They are safer because the patent holder paid for the trials that found any potential problems during development.

So the question is how we can reduce the hurdles to market entry while keeping incentives high enough to first develop the medicines we need and, second, to test them for safety. A more agile FDA is definitely one step in the right direction.

Regulators across the developed world mutually accepting each other's approval decisions would also speed up patient access and reduce spending on redundant trials across countries.

But none of that works unless there is something worth the spend at the end of it. A patent turns a promising molecule into a file of evidence about who a drug helps, who it harms, and at what dose. That evidence is what consumers want, and it is the reason to care about patents even if you never own a share.