Consumer, Patient Groups Push for Fast Markup of ETHIC Act

A number of groups and individuals self-described as “representing consumers, patients, health care providers, and academic experts in pharmaceutical policy and patent law” have submitted a letter to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee urging members to quickly advance the “Eliminating Thickets to Increase Competition  (ETHIC) Act,’’ which was introduced in the House of Representatives last May by Representative Jodey Arrington (R-TX) along with two other Republicans and four Democrats.

The bill was also introduced in the Senate in July 2025 on a bipartisan basis by U.S. Senators Peter Welch (D-VT), Josh Hawley (R-MO), and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN).

The ETHIC Act would limit the ability of patent owners to assert more than one patent from the same “Patent Group” in a patent infringement action, with the goal of addressing so-called patent thickets.

Patent thicketing is a controversial term that is criticized by the pro-patent community as being a misnomer. While the common perception is that patent thickets are a way for pharmaceutical companies to extend the life of a patented drug to the detriment of generic entry, pro-patent groups like the Council for Innovation Promotion (C4IP) have called this narrative “misleading.”

“In reality, many patents can be necessary to capture the full scope of all the inventions in sophisticated and complicated products, especially in highly advanced fields — and, as confirmed by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the number of patents is not correlated to the timing of generic entry,” said a C4IP statement issued last August.

The ETHIC Act would prohibit anyone from asserting more than one patent in the same Patent Group against a particular party. A “Patent Group” is defined in the bill as “2 or more commonly owned patents or applications that—”:

‘(I) are identified on 1 or more disclaimers under section 253 to obviate obviousness-type double patenting of another commonly owned patent; or

‘(II) are subject to 1 or more disclaimers under section 253 to obviate obviousness-type double patenting of another commonly owned patent.

‘(ii) For purposes of clause (i)(I)—

(I) each patent or application that identifies the same patent or application on a disclaimer under section 253 is part of the same Patent Group; and

‘(II) each patent or application that is identified on a disclaimer under section 253 is part of the same Patent Group as the patent or application subject to the disclaimer.’’

The groups’ letter asks the Committee to go even further that the bill’s proposals by adding a requirement that would knock out all patents in a family linked by terminal disclaimers when one is held invalid. This was a controversial proposal originally put forward in May 2024 under then-U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Kathi Vidal. According to the letter, this “would complement ETHIC by deterring companies from using continuation patents to build patent thickets in the first place, as weak continuation patents would put enforceability of earlier linked patents at risk.”

The USPTO, still under Vidal, officially withdrew the proposal in December 2024. A vocal opponent of the proposed change, Sherry Knowles of Knowles Intellectual Property Strategies, said at the time of the withdrawal that “the USPTO should not be weaponized against the biopharmaceutical industry.”

But the groups, which include Public Citizen and the Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge (I-MAK), the latter of which has been widely criticized by the patent community for using faulty data to make anti-patent arguments to Congress, claim that the ETHIC Act, along with the USPTO’s withdrawn proposal, would “help curtail duplicative patenting and limit anticompetitive tactics by pharmaceutical corporations that deprive U.S. patients of more affordable generic and biosimilar alternatives.”