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/