It is often argued that the best case for patents is in the
pharmaceutical industry. The indivisibility is large, with estimates of
the average cost of bringing a single new drug to market as high as
$800 million. Patent protection is more limited than in other
industries: because of the lengthy gap between discovery and
approval of a new drug, the effective monopoly protection is
estimated, since the 1990s, to last only 12 years, apart for
extensions. Indeed, according to industry surveys, the only industry
in which patents are thought to play an important role in bringing
new products to market is the pharmaceutical industry.