Law360, New York ( June 29, 2016, 3:16 PM EDT) -- A bedrock principle of U.S. health care is that a strong patent system is critical to new drug development. Tufts University, which has tracked drug development costs for over a decade, estimates that it cost manufacturers $2.6 billion, on average, to bring a new drug to market in 2014 — up from just over $1 billion in 2003. President Obama's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology reports that it now takes 14 years, on average, to bring a new drug to market — up from about nine years just a few years ago. With patent protection for new drug discoveries fixed at 20 years, these statistics ominously warn drug manufactures that they will have increasingly less time to recoup increasingly more investment with each passing year. And this partially explains why drug prices, which are not regulated in the U.S., continue to rise as the market prices move in lockstep with the investment risk, just like any other commodity....