Akademik

n.

A sharp drop in revenue that a company experiences when a lucrative patent expires.

Lilly is already facing the biggest "patent cliff" in the industry. Five of its six leading products face generic competition in the next four years. Barbara Ryan, a stock analyst with Deutsche Bank, said Lilly's earnings will decline 35 percent by 2014 unless it makes one of the larger acquisitions it has historically resisted.

—Duff Wilson, " Lilly Stops Alzheimer's Drug Trials: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/business/18lilly.html," The New York Times, August 17, 2010

There is a simple explanation for most of the mergers and acquisitions in the pharmaceutical world these days: the so-called Patent Cliff. Simply put, many of the drug industry's biggest earners — blockbuster medications that have paid the bills for the last decade — are about to lose their patent protections.

—Christopher K. Hepp, " Big Pharma gearing up to face the Patent Cliff: http://www.philly.com/philly/business/homepage/20101112_Big_Pharma_gearing_up_to_face_the_Patent_Cliff.html," The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 12, 2010

Stanford University is poised at the edge of "the cliff," its term for the financial turning point when its leading patent — the Cohen-Boyer recombinant DNA patent — expires.

—"At the edge of Cohen-Boyer patent 'cliff', Stanford seeks $ 15 M cushion," Biotechnology Newswatch, June 21, 1993