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Breaking the biologic bottleneck

Medications are stored on shelves at a pharmacy.
Photo: Eric Thayer/Getty Images

By shortening timelines and lowering costs, regulators aim to reshape incentives that have historically favored brand-name drugmakers.

The Food and Drug Administration is moving to dismantle one of the most persistent barriers to affordable medicine in the United States: the slow approval of generic versions of biological drugs. These complex therapies, developed from living cells rather than chemicals, have long been both the pharmaceutical industry’s most prized