This is a bad question and a horrible attempt to answer (I'm being so abrasive because at this moment this is the highest voted comment). It's a bad question be

This is a bad question and a horrible attempt to answer (I'm being so abrasive because at this moment this is the highest voted comment). It's a bad question because it invites wishful thinking. Prediction generally has a very bad track record, and right now you're trying to predict a mixture of economy, free market incentives and technology. Hard to find something more unpredictable. What you can do is look at the past and find correlation and causation. It's reasonably straightforward. Take a number of drugs and treatments, best if done randomly. See the process that got them on the market, and try to figure where patents fit in the picture. I tried it just for fun, and found something interesting: up to half a century ago, you had a person's name associated with a drug. More recently, and you have a company. This is not an answer, but a hint that maybe things move towards being more expensive. Which of course brings us to the regulatory process: once a drug identified, what is the cost of having the papers stamped and who is motivated to pay for it?