President Trump hopes to finalize changes to the North American Free Trade Agreement by early May. For months, he has urged his trade negotiators to rework the pact in a way that reduces America’s trade deficit.

To accomplish this goal, negotiators must ensure the new NAFTA enables American industries that are dependent on intellectual property to thrive. These industries account for more than half of all U.S. exports.

The current NAFTA doesn’t adequately protect intellectual property. That’s nobody’s fault — it’s just a reflection of the priorities of the early 1990s economy. When NAFTA was first negotiated nearly 30 years ago, trade mostly revolved around goods such as steel or grain. But today, countries export much more than that — including ideas and designs. Such “intellectual property” includes everything from the code for smartphone apps to the molecular structure of lifesaving medicines.

The United States is a veritable IP factory. In 2014, it exported $90 billion more IP-products than it imported. That’s the largest trade surplus of any category of exports.

What makes this trade surplus possible? Strong IP protections — such as patents, copyrights, and trademarks. These ensure that U.S. innovators can recoup their investments without being ripped off by copycats.

IP protections are particularly important in the biopharmaceutical industry. Drug companies face enormous up-front costs to develop and test their medicines. On average, innovative biopharmaceutical companies invest $2.6 billion and up to 15 years to research and develop a single medicine. And only one of every 10 thousand molecules discovered in U.S. labs ever becomes an FDA-approved medicine.

Once that first pill is approved by the FDA, the hard work is mostly over, but the risks mount as rivals look to expropriate the intellectual (and financial) capital that went into its development. If competitors — including companies and sometimes foreign governments — could immediately copy that pill formula and sell it as their own, they’d undercut U.S. innovators and put them out of business. Soon, no company would take the risk of investing in original research.

IP protections hold copycats at bay for a number of years, enabling innovative companies to recoup their investments, reward investors, and fund future research in a very risky environment.

That research is producing some truly miraculous medicines. Consider “biologics.” These drugs, which are grown from living cells, have the potential to cure cancer and numerous other debilitating diseases. In an overwhelmingly bipartisan effort, American lawmakers have established necessary IP safeguards for biologics by granting these products 12 years of “data protection.” This prevents competitors from accessing an innovator’s clinical trial data for 12 years, giving biopharmaceutical companies a chance to generate a return on their investments.

Thanks to such protections for data and other IP, the United States has become a world-class producer of biologics. The FDA approved about 20 biologics in 2017 — including a gene therapy that can cure blindness with a single treatment. Hundreds of experimental biologics are currently in clinical trials.

Of course, patients benefit from this research, but so do American workers. The U.S. biopharmaceutical industry supports nearly 4.8 million jobs and contributes more than $1.3 trillion to the economy. Without proper IP protections in trade deals, all of this economic progress is put at risk, making it harder for innovators to recoup their investments and pursue new lines of research.

By including stronger IP protections in the updated NAFTA, the United States could shrink the trade deficit, create more jobs, and spur additional research into innovative new products such as lifesaving drugs.

Charles Boustany is a retired physician and former congressman from Louisiana.