[Pharm-policy] Cipla price cut

[Mike Palmedo]

http://www.economictimes.com/today/13comp16.htm

Cipla cuts triple-drug AIDS therapy prices by 39%

Gauri Kamath
July 13, 2001
MUMBAI
CIPLA, India’s third largest drugmaker, has slashed the prices of its
anti-AIDS drugs in the country for the fourth time in the past nine
months.

This time round, the company has cut prices of its tripledrug regimen by
as much as 39 per cent. The three-drug combination of lamivudine,
stavudine and nevirapine which has the potential to reduce the HIV virus
in the body to very low levels, will now cost the patient Rs 2,130 per
month down from Rs 3,495 per month.

Cipla has also cut prices of other anti-AIDS drugs zidovudine,
indinavir, and didanosine which it sells in India. The across-the-board
price cuts which range from 14 per cent to 54 per cent were put into
effect three days ago, a Cipla official said.

The most hefty price reduction has been on the stavudine range.
Stavudine is one of the drugs used to prevent HIV from spreading to
uninfected cells in the human body. The prices have been cut by roughly
50 per cent for different dosages of the drug.

Cipla has also launched a combination of two drugs lamivudine and
stavudine for the first time in India to improve patient compliance. On
the anvil is another drug efavirenz.

All these drugs have been launched in the global market by
research-driven multinationals and patented by them. In India, product
patents are not recognised giving companies like Cipla a chance to
replicate these drugs by a different process at a fraction of the
multinationals’ costs.

Cipla has been dominating the anti-AIDS drugs market for several years
as it was the first to launch an anti-AIDS drug in the country in the
early part of the nineties. The company has continuously slashed prices
to push demand.

Though India has the second largest number of HIV-infected persons in
the world, sales of AIDS drugs in India have failed to pick up because
of a combination of socio-economic factors.

Of late a clutch of Indian companies such as Aurobindo Pharma, Hetero
Drugs, Zydus Cadila and Ranbaxy Laboratories has also forayed into the
market for finished dosage forms with competitive prices.

The Cipla official however said the company’s formulations for HIV/AIDS
patients were the cheapest in the market place. He also said Cipla’s
price cuts were not the result of competition but technological and
process improvements.