The incentive for a broad patent estate drives development in pharmaceutical and chemical industry. There is a movement in the state of patent law to heighten the standards of patentability. The Supreme Court is currently reviewing a case that can drastically change the obviousness requirement under the patent laws. The pharmaceutical industry's growing number of start-up and incubator companies are built around very narrow chemical and biological moieties which are protected by patents.  Any modification of the current state of law may drastically impact the expectation of return investment by such companies.

Generally, in the chemical and pharmaceutical fields, a small modification to previously known active moieties can cause drastic changes in the function, safety, effectiveness.  The prior state of patent law embraced such modifications. As long as there was no teaching, suggestion or motivation in the prior art to combine the particular elements, the modification invention may be considered non-obvious and thus patentable.   This paper discusses the effect of the current  movement in the U.S. Patent Laws in early stage drug development process.