COVID 19 –Need to break patent strangle holds of Big Pharmaceuticals
While the world is courageously fighting the Covid19 pandemic, we have to reflect on the pharmaceutical industry on whether it has effectively played its role to safeguard us from such diseases. Unfortunately this global trillion dollar industry has not been really investing in innovation to synthesize new drugs in the last few decades.
Research shows that 78 percent of patents approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration FDA) are for modified medications which have been already discovered and are available in the market. Thus these industries rather ‘sugar coat’ existing medicines in order to apply for new patents for supposedly ‘new drug’.
Investing in innovation for drugs to fight diseases like Covid 19 are not considered growth markets and are usually ignored. From 2000 to 2011, only 4 percent of newly-approved products globally were designed to treat neglected diseases that affect lower- and middle-income countries. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/10/17/pharmaceutical/
Diseases and epidemics that effect poor countries are not important as they don’t ensure big profits, when countries circumvent patent holders and use compulsory licensing to access cheaper generic medicines during a public health crisis.
The question we have to ask is “Are we still going to leave critical drug innovation and production to the interest of the free market? After all, not all drugs in the market are 100% original innovations of the pharmaceutical industry. Sofosbuvir innovation, which treats hepatitis C, is reported to be have been heavily funded by the Department of Veterans Affairs and the National Institutes of Health in USA.
But when the private biotech company Gilead Sciences later acquired the drug, it priced a 12-week course of pills at $84,000 in the U.S. market. By the end of 2017, Sofosbuvir had generated over $50 billion in sales.
Once again, the spot light is on this big pharmaceutical corporation, Gilead, as it has seeked and been granted a 7 year regulatory monopoly for Remdesivir, a drug possible to treat Covid 19. On top of having primary patents in more than 70 countries, it is disappointing that the company has chosen to seek orphan drug designation from the US Food and Drug Administration. https://www.keionline.org/32546. It is obvious that Covid 19 is a pandemic and in no way can be classified as an orphan drug .
(Orphan status is given to drugs and biologics defined as “those intended for the safe and effective treatment, diagnosis or prevention of rare diseases/disorders that affect fewer than 200,000 people in the U.S., or that affect more than 200,000 persons but are not expected to recover the costs of developing and marketing a treatment drug).
We need regulations that enable us dismantle patent rights and make drugs data, sample products and know-how that are needed for generic development transparent, to facilitate mass production in order to immediately reach out to all positive patients worldwide .
Gilead’s self-interest for profits will clearly fail us in our global fight against this pandemic. We need to de-commodify drug research and production so that drugs are produced affordable for all life saving needs and not for profits!
Since in Malaysia we don’t have great capabilities for drug innovation and we are a nett importer of intellectual property, we have to ensure that our Ministry of Trade and Industry does not tie its hands and signs Free Trade Agreements (FTA), bilateral or regional that further enhance Intellectual Property Rights and give away patent extensions to these big pharmaceutical companies.
In times of crisis, these pharmaceutical companies can hold us ransom by hiking up the prices and prohibiting manufacturing or importation of cheaper generic drugs.
A Sivarajan is PSM secretary general
The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of The Leaders Online
