Please give us all your money

[n2doc]

Ben Goldacre, 5 September 2009, The Guardian

How do patents affect science? This week in India, US drug company Gilead lost their appeal to stop local companies making cheap copies of their Aids drug Tenofovir. They are not alone: in 2007 Novartis lost a lengthy case trying to force the Indian government into strengthening their weak patent laws. India remains the free pharmacy of the world.

Cheap drugs may not be the only benefit of India’s approach, but the drugs are certainly cheap. The cost of Tenofovir in developed countries is $5,700 per patient per year: the Indian generic version is available in the developing world for just $800. Because of this price difference, 75% of the 4m people in the world taking medication for Aids are using generic copies. Almost all of these are made in India, and in fact, about 40% of the world’s aids patients are taking drugs made by one company: Cipla, which is now the biggest manufacturer of antiretroviral drugs in the world.

Ignoring patent and licensing issues has allowed Dr Yusuf Hamied, director of Cipla, to innovate: even though each drug is officially owned by a different company, he could put a common combination of three treatments (Stavudine, Lamivudine and Nevirapine) into one simple, single combination pill. This increases treatment compliance – it’s easier to take your medication correctly – and that keeps you alive longer, while reducing the emergence of resistant strains.

Hamied calls his pill Triomune (he also offers “Antiflu”, a copy of Tamiflu for the developing world, and many more). In 2001 he was selling to MSF clinics for $350 per person per year, more than 30 times cheaper than the official versions of these drugs. Triomune is now only $87 a year. This is amazing. Hamied is a hero.

Richard Sykes, head of GlaxoSmithKline (and now now retired rector of Imperial College London) disagreed. He called Hamied a “pirate” and described the quality of Indian generic drugs as “iffy”. Hamied says GSK is a “global serial killer“ for charging high prices for their medication. So who is right?

more:

http://www.badscience.net/2009/09/please-give-us-all-your-money/

[AnneD]

1. What happened to the concept....

for the good of mankind, I guess we would still have Small pox, Measles, Polio, etc if it were up to some folks.

[Warpy]

2. The cost of bringing a drug from NIH research to market

is absolutely enormous. The cost of patented drugs is high because the costs of doing all the trials, maintaining and distilling all the paperwork, and taking the risk the drug will fail large scale trials as many of them do are staggering.

What India has done is simply take advantage of someone's work and expense in simply copying the drugs after they've passed all the tests and gone to market in the west. Quite simply, it's theft.

However, and this is where the good of humanity comes in, there is simply no way for the developing world to help defray the costs incurred by pharmaceutical companies in the developed world. Cheaper drugs are essential to these populations and if the US and European pharmaceutical companies can't see their way to subsidizing them, they'd better be prepared to deal with copies.

Offering cheaper drugs to the developing world would be in the best interest of the big drug companies in the west, preventing competitors from producing knockoffs and undercutting them. One wonders why this has never occurred to them.

All they can do now is complain about the injustice of it all while mounting a PR campaign about the inferiority of knockoff drugs.