The Pacific Research Institute – the non-partisan, California-based, free-market think tank – today hailed a landmark California Supreme Court decision protecting future medical innovation.
The ruling in the Gilead Tenofir Cases overturns a lower court decision that threatened to expose pharmaceutical innovators to sweeping new liability for decisions about the timing of the development of future medicines.
In November 2024, PRI filed an amicus curiae brief in the case in support of Gilead, arguing that allowing the lawsuit to proceed would discourage the research and development into future life-saving medicines. PRI’s brief was authored by noted constitutional scholar and University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein.
“The California Supreme Court recognized a simple truth: medical breakthroughs are driven by science, not by lawsuits,” said Sally C. Pipes, PRI President, CEO, and Thomas W. Smith Fellow in Health Care Policy. “This is an important victory not only for medical innovators, but for every patient who is counting on the next generation of life-saving treatment.”
In its decision, the Court concluded that imposing liability on drug manufacturers for delaying development of a future medicine—even where the medicine currently on the market is not defective—would create extraordinary burdens on pharmaceutical innovation, invite courts and juries to second-guess complex scientific and business decisions, and ultimately risk slowing the development of new treatments.
The lawsuit sought to hold Gilead liable not because one of its FDA-approved medicines was defective, but because plaintiffs alleged the company should have brought a different HIV treatment to market sooner. PRI argued that recognizing such a theory of liability would have created a dangerous precedent under which companies could be sued for allegedly failing to innovate quickly enough—even when the medicine already on the market remained safe, effective, and FDA-approved.
“The Court wisely recognized that drug development is an extraordinarily complex, highly regulated process—not something that should be judged years later through speculative lawsuits,” Pipes concluded.
The Pacific Research Institute (www.pacificresearch.org) champions freedom, opportunity, and personal responsibility through free-market policy ideas. Follow PRI on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.