[Pharm-policy] Kenya: Row Over AIDS Vaccine Patent

[James Love]

http://allafrica.com/stories/200010140006.html

Row Over AIDS Vaccine Patent

Panafrican News Agency 
October 14, 2000 

Tervil Okoko
Nairobi, Kenya 

A row is simmering between a group of Kenyan scientists and their
British counterparts over the patenting of an AIDS vaccine whose
development they have both been involved in.

The controversy arises as a result of reports from London this
week that the British scientists have given themselves all the credit
for the vaccine by taking out a patent in Britain, leaving out the
Kenyans.

Dr Job Bwayo, the leader of the Kenya AIDS Vaccine Initiative said
"Immediately we realised our names were not included, we entered
into correspondence with our collaborators to ensure we were
reflected as part of the researchers. We're waiting for the
outcome."

The DNA vaccine, developed by both Kenyan and British
scientists, is based on a research carried out almost ten years ago
on 50 prostitutes from the Nairobi slums of Majengo.

The research found out that the prostitutes had developed
immunity from HIV infection as a result of daily exposure to the
virus.

But although it turned out that the prostitutes later reverted to
HIV-positive after quitting the trade, the researchers have been
going on with tests on human volunteers on the vaccine's efficacy.

Bwayo told journalists that the Oxford University team, led by Prof.
Andrew McMichael, is expected in Nairobi next week to respond to
international charges that they jumped the gun by patenting the
vaccine without any reference to their Kenyan counterparts.


     [snip]

The Kenya government has ordered thorough investigation, saying
it will defend the Kenyan scientists.


     [snip]

The minister called upon Kenyan researchers to include matters of
intellectual property rights in the launch of any collaborative
research agreements or memoranda of understanding.

Kenyans have particularly been perturbed by the report quoting
McMichael of Oxford University's Institute of Molecular Medicine as
saying that his team had been forced to take out the patent so
hurriedly and secretively "to prevent other organisations from doing
so."

He was also quoted as being at pains to explain that the Oxford
University team is a non-profit body, a thing Kenyans have
interpreted as meaning that there is plenty of financial gain in the
project.

The brouhaha could not have come at a worse time for the Britons
- during the first Nobel Prize week of the millennium - and during
an era of rampant intellectual property thefts, piracy and
plagiarism.

Incidentally, Prof. Lier Reridar of the University of Bergen, Norway,
recently cautioned scientists from the poor countries to make sure
they enter into only well defined agreements with their Western
counterparts.

>From discussions with Bwayo and the other Kenyan researchers, it
now seems that his team from the University of Nairobi
Department of Microbiology collaborated with their Oxford
University colleagues only on the basis of a memorandum of
understanding, which was drawn up long before the AIDS vaccine
project.

Unfortunately, the memorandum says nothing about patenting,
giving the British scientists a leeway.


   [snip]