any physician could currently prescribe all the components of many proposed polypills separately for their patients, whether therapeutically or preventively. and since the ingredients of many possible polypills are off patent, it can be cheap to commercialize, although fdc products with novel combinations or formulations can sometimes themselves be patented. of course, for any fdc product, the potential market for a given combination of drugs/dosages would need to be sufficiently large to justify the clinical trials and other expenses associated with mass-producing a new drug.