[Ip-health] Times of London on Cipla's efforts export generic tamiflu

[Mike Palmedo]

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,16614-2071659,00.html

Indian hero's new mission: to bring cheap drug for bird flu to millions

By Michael Binyon
The Times of London
March 6, 2006

He took on Big Pharma over Aids. Now Yusuf Hamied wants to help poor
countries beat the latest killer

HIS name is a red rag to Big Pharma, but his noisy challenge to the
global patents system has made him a hero to thousands fighting for
better health in the developing world.

Yusuf Hamied, head of Cipla, India=92s huge generic drugs company, has
stirred global controversy by promising to supply Aids drugs for less
than $1 a day. Now he has announced that he is ready to take on bird flu.

At issue, again, is the whole question of generic versus proprietary
drugs =97 an issue that has pitted Western capitalism against Third World
campaigners and, perhaps more than any other dispute, cast moral
opprobrium on multinationals attempting to protect the fruits of their
expensive research.

India has just granted Cipla a licence to distribute Anti-Flu, the
generic version of Tamiflu, the drug sought across the world in the
fight to contain bird flu. From his company=92s 30 manufacturing centres
in India, Dr Hamied promises that he can distribute 500,000 capsules
immediately to any Asian country in need. It is a pledge that has gained
him fresh support in his long fight to break the global monopoly of
multinational drug companies.

Officially, that fight is over. For years India was able to produce
cheap drugs by ignoring global patents and allowing powerful companies,
such as Cipla, to produce reverseengineered copies that were more
affordable. But India has now joined the World Trade Organisation and,
since the beginning of last year, has committed itself to enforcing the
protection of international property. Now no manufacturer can produce
drugs that infringe patents or depend wholly on the research of Western
pharmaceutical giants.

Cipla=92s days are far from over, however, and Dr Hamied, the
indefatigable chairman and managing director, is as combative as ever in
defying attempts to limit his products. Indian law allows manufacturers
that began production before January 1 last year to continue, whatever
the dispute over patents. The same applies to any company that had
already invested substantial research and development (R&D) funds in its
product.

Dr Hamied argues that oseltamavir, the generic anti-flu drug, was being
researched by Cipla before Roche marketed Tamiflu. The Swiss giant=92s
application for a patent in India =97 which Cipla opposes =97 has not yet
been granted. He therefore intends to sell his drug not only to a
subcontinent fearful that avian flu =97 which, if it mutates into a form
transmissible between human beings, will sweep through poor villages =97
he is also ready to export the product to countries where patent
protection is not enforced and to the 49 countries designated as the
least developed, where the world is willing to allow cheap generic replicas=
.

Already Cipla says that it has received four export orders. The clients=92
identities are secret, but the first 50,000 doses have gone to a country
where Roche does not have a patent.

In many ways, this is a replay of the confrontation over Aids. The
promise by Cipla =97 among other generic manufacturers =97 to deliver a
year=92s supply of Aids drugs to African victims at a cost of $300 a year,
at a time when Western multinationals were charging $15,000, brought the
issue to a head.

There was uproar over what campaigners saw as exploitation by Big Pharma.

An international conference, called by the United Nations, put enormous
pressure on the multinationals to change tack. Bill Gates and President
Clinton threw their weight behind the campaign and the multinationals
were forced to cut prices charged for Aids drugs in Africa by up to 90
per cent.

For Dr Hamied, who at 25 became one of the youngest Indians to receive a
doctorate at Cambridge, it is a moral issue. =93I=92m not against
intellectual property, I=92m against monopoly,=94 he says.

Most Indians are still poor, and the choice for villagers is generic
drugs or nothing. In the days of the Cold War and non-alignment, when
India kept the West at arm=92s length, it disregarded patents and made a
fortune selling generic medicine to the Soviet Union and other countries
unable to pay hard currency for Western drugs. However, the Indian
pharmaceutical market is now approaching $5 billion and India has since
become central to the global economy; it has had to ditch its cheap
drugs policy as part of its adherence to international agreements on
intellectual property at the very time when many, even in the West,
believe that Dr Hamied=92s approach is fully justified.

Bill Clinton was in India last month and accompanied Dr Hamied around
the Cipla plant in Goa, applauding his commitment to giving the maximum
number of Aids victims treatment through low-cost medicine.
Nevertheless, he said, only 1.5 million of the 6.2 million people
desperately in need were getting the medicines.

The multinationals have fought back hard against the generic companies,
which they see as parasites.

Dr Hamied, whose father started Cipla in a Bombay bungalow in 1935, is
now a rich man, but he points to the market failures of patent
protection in India and other developing countries. Before 1970, many
drugs available in the developed world could not be found in India. And,
almost alone among India=92s pharmaceutical producers, Dr Hamied would
like a regime under which the innovator receives royalties from
imitators, not an exclusive patent.

Others argue that India is no longer poor. There are plenty of people
who can afford Western drugs. They say that the country cannot afford to
alienate the multinationals at a time when India is trying to market
itself in the West as an alternative health supplier for elective
surgery =97 for which, of course, Western patients would expect the latest
Western drugs.

In many ways Dr Hamied, 70, has won his long fight: Big Pharma is making
many products available cheaply in poor countries; the United Nations
has taken up the issue; and some Indian drug makers are themselves now
able to pioneer new medicines for which they want full global patent
protection. Without his challenge, however, the world=92s poor might have
had far less access than they do to cheap drugs to combat the big
killers: TB, malaria, heart disease. It is a legacy of which he is proud.

--
Mike Palmedo
Research and Web
Consumer Project on Technology
T =96 202-332-2670
F =96 202-332-2673
mpalmedo@cptech.org