Let's say I get a patent issued for a process/formulation that cures a disease or treats damaged hair.
Can someone else come along and invent something that cures the same disease or repairs hair, but they found a totally different chemical, process, and formulation?
Maybe a better way of asking is: can you patent the result or function of an invention?
Yes - patents are not for results but for devices and processes that can achieve the result.
An airplane and a helicopter can have similar results; more than one medication helps to reduce blood sugar levels.
Yes, certainly.
For example, according to the Smithsonian Institution, over four thousand patents have been granted for mousetraps, and another 40 or so are successfully patented every year.
If both inventions work in different ways, but achieve the same thing, they can both be patented. Take a petrol engine, diesel engine, and a Wankel engine.
If your inventions work in the same way, one gets the patent, one gets nothing. Tough luck.
I don't know anything about other fields, but drugs can do extremely similar things by extremely similar means and still all get patented.
For example, there were a lot of patented angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors (drugs with generic names ending in -pril). There were so many that doctors made jokes about 'another-pril'.
These drugs all
