[Ip-health] Guardian: [United Kingdom] International development minister urges firms to pool HIV patents

[Thiru Balasubramaniam]

According to this Guardian article, Mike Foster, international
development minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Northern Ireland, is urging drug companies to pool patents for HIV/
AIDS medicines.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/12/hiv-medicine-patents-drugs-comp=
anies

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International development minister urges firms to pool HIV patents

=95 50 million will need new drugs by 2030, MPs warn
=95 Resistance growing to basic combinations


     * Sarah Boseley, health editor
     * guardian.co.uk, Sunday 12 July 2009 20.34 BST
     * larger | smaller
     * Article history

Drug companies should give up their patent rights to HIV medicines to
help prevent the deaths of millions of people in poor countries, a
British government minister will say this week.

The international development minister, Mike Foster, will call on
pharmaceutical companies to put lives before profits, as the all-party
parliamentary group on Aids publishes a report this week detailing the
scale of the "treatment timebomb". By 2030, they estimate, 50 million
people will need new drugs, which are currently prohibitively
expensive, to keep them alive.

Three million people are on cheap, basic HIV drug combinations, but
they are only a third of those in need and resistance is growing to
these drugs both in the developing world and in the west.

New and improved drugs are urgently required, but they are expensive,
and cheap generic copies of the newest drugs can no longer easily be
made and sold because of tightened intellectual property rules in
India and China.

The UK generally has a very close relationship with the drug
companies, which regard patents as the means of recouping the
substantial costs of researching and developing new drugs.

But Foster says they must change their stance on HIV. He wants
companies to contribute to a "patent pool", which the international
drug-purchasing facility, Unitaid =96 set up by a number of donor
countries, including the UK =96 is trying to establish.

"While it is absolutely vital that we work to reduce the human cost of
HIV by focusing our efforts on preventing new infections, we must also
face up to the stark reality of the treatment challenge we face. The
pharmaceutical industry has an opportunity to act now to help prevent
future human catastrophe. It is time for them to state their clear
commitment to make new HIV medicines affordable to those who need them
most."

According to the all-party report, if HIV patents are put in a pool,
generics companies =96 which make the cheap combinations now used in
Africa =96 will be permitted to make low-cost copies of newer drugs and
devise new combinations in a single pill, which is important for
people living in poverty.

The report lays out in stark terms the coming crisis. "It took
political activism almost a decade ago to make life-saving drugs
available to the poor in developing countries," it says. "Only a third
of those who need it are on treatment and this treatment will not work
for them forever. Political activism is needed once more to ensure
that the next generation of drugs is available to the world's poorest
in future."

MP David Barrow, who chairs the group, said: "We are sitting on a
treatment timebomb. We must reduce the price of second-line medicines
and less toxic first-line medicines before millions need them. We
cannot sleepwalk into a situation where we can only afford to treat a
tiny proportion of those infected."

The only way to end the HIV/Aids epidemic is to prevent infection, the
report says, but because the drugs suppress the virus, those receiving
treatment are much less likely to pass it on.


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Thiru Balasubramaniam
Geneva Representative
Knowledge Ecology International (KEI)
thiru@keionline.org


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