Evergreening

Evergreening is like when you have a toy that you really like and you want to keep playing with it forever. But sometimes, the toy gets old and broken and you can't play with it anymore. So, what you do is you take it to the toy store and get a new one, right?

Well, imagine if the toy store didn't have any new toys, but they told you that they could fix your old toy and make it like new again. That's kind of what evergreening is, but with medicines instead of toys.

When a company makes a new medicine, they can get a patent on it for a certain amount of time. This means that nobody else can make the same medicine and sell it. But when the patent runs out, other companies can start making the same medicine, and that means the original company might lose some money.

So what some companies do is they try to keep the patent going for as long as possible, even after it's supposed to expire. They might change little things about the medicine, like the way it's made or the form it comes in, so that they can say it's a new medicine and get a new patent.

It's like if you had a red toy car and you wanted to keep playing with it, but you wanted it to be different. So you painted it green, and now it's a "new" toy car that you can keep playing with.

This is called "evergreening" because the company is trying to keep the medicine "green" and new, even though it's really just an old medicine with a few changes. Some people think this is unfair, because it means that the company can keep making money off the same medicine, while people who need it might have to pay more for it than they should.

So, evergreening is when a company tries to keep a patent going on a medicine by making little changes to it, even though it's really the same medicine.