Jay Bhattacharya on testing off-patent drugs for new uses: recommends

At the February 3, 2026 Senate HELP hearing, Bhattacharya told senators that testing existing off-patent drugs against rare diseases and cancers is “how we reduce drug prices,” according to the hearing record preserved by C-SPAN via the Internet Archive. His reasoning, as he framed it, is that low-cost treatments can come from already-generic compounds: since these drugs are off-patent, repurposing them for new indications could deliver affordable therapies without the pricing dynamics of newly patented drugs. This site presents his claim as his argument, not as an established pharmacological or economic conclusion.

This page chronicles a stated position of the person above. It is not medical advice and not the site's own conclusion.