It goes back to being able to draw investment into the country. R and D is going to drive investment. You're entirely correct, the government has been very supportive of the industry through a number of programs to develop its R and D.
At the end of the day, as I said, it's a very expensive process to develop a drug. It's about a billion dollars. It takes a long time, some 10 to 15 years. That's a long horizon for a lot of investors and there's quite a bit of risk associated with that. Anything we can do to provide greater security for that investment is going to be important for the industry in attaining commercialization.
IP protection is certainly one of those. That's the big part of this deal. The patent term restoration essentially gives them a bit of time that they can tack on to recoup some of the costs associated with the development of the drug, if the drug does get tied up in the regulatory process, which it can. It's particularly important for a lot of the companies in my membership because they're in the biologic space, which are complex molecules. That is different from the traditional discussion of generics, where you essentially copy a small molecule. You could copy this newspaper and that's what that would be like, but in the biologics it's like trying to copy what's on this iPad. It's a very complex, very different world.
Sometimes the regulatory process is a little slower with the biologic space. That's particularly important when we're dealing with the orphan drug world. Anything that can restore some of that lost time to the patent holder, to the intellectual property holder, will help them to attract investment.