BiDil set a precedent. Seeing its success with the Food and Drug Administration, pharmaceutical firms began to file patent applications for other treatments that had been shown to work better in certain racial and ethnic groups. Looking at US patent applications filed between 2001 and 2005, the years before BiDil’s approval, Kahn found that 65 mentioned race or ethnicity. Between 2006 and 2016, there were 384 that did.
