HIV Drug Firm - Call to Pool Patents

posted: 07/09/2009

Leading UK and international organisations have written to Britain's largest drug company urging it to pool its patents on HIV medicines to help save millions of lives in developing countries.

A letter from 15 organisations, including the Stop Aids Campaign, Médecins Sans Frontières, Unicef and Christian Aid, calls on GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) to join a patent pool being put together by UNITAID, which aims to improve access to drugs for HIV, malaria and tuberculosis (TB) in poor countries.

The patent pool would allow cheap copies and combinations of HIV treatments to be made without legal restraint or delays from the manufacturers, whose monopolies are protected for 20 years.

The letter follows Andrew Witty, the chief executive of GlaxoSmithKline, saying that all he knew of UNITAID was what he had read in the papers. UNITAID’s mission is to help increase access to treatment for HIV, malaria and  tuberculosis, for people in poor countries, by getting speedy price cuts for tests and medicines.

On a trip to Katine in northern Uganda, Witty made clear his reservations about a patent pool for HIV drugs, although he said: "I'm not saying no to anything because nobody's actually put in front of me a really concrete proposition." He added that GSK was already doing a lot to help those with HIV in developing countries, including funding research into drugs for children, and he was willing to let generic companies make cheap copies of its HIV drugs under licence.

Witty went to Katine to explain how his own plans to help the developing world would work in one corner of Africa.

He has cut the prices of GSK drugs in poor countries to no more than a quarter of the level in the west and promised to reinvest 20% of profits on those drugs in the developing world. He has also launched a patent pool of his own, with more than 800 compounds and molecules that might be useful to researchers into neglected diseases. HIV, he insists, is not a neglected disease.

Much more still to do

In response, the 15 organisations wrote in their letter: "GSK's insistence that a patent pool for HIV is unnecessary is surprising given the woeful lack of innovation into HIV treatments suitable for children, and the obvious need for new safer and more effective fixed dose combinations for adults." The group also urged Witty to meet UNITAID.

Alan Smith, chair of the Stop Aids Campaign, said: "The UNITAID patent pool is our best hope of increasing access to life-saving medicines on the scale that is needed to achieve universal access.

"It is crucial that Andrew Witty and GSK … engage in an honest and positive manner with the UNITAID taskforce."

A letter from Unitaid to the Guardian on 15 October reinforced the need for a HIV patent pool:

'Unitaid welcomes GlaxoSmithKline's renewed interest in the Unitaid patent pool initiative for HIV/Aids medicines and its openness to taking a flexible approach to managing intellectual property (Letters, 10 September); and GlaxoSmithKline urged to pool its patents on HIV drugs, 7 September). Wherever multiple patents owned by different companies are required to make a product, patent pools may offer a useful solution. Pills that combine three medicines into one tablet to treat HIV/Aids are a good example of such products.

The World Health Organisation recommends the use of such pills because they make it easier for patients to take their treatment and reduces the risk that viral resistance will render the drugs useless. However, patents from two to three different companies are usually required, meaning that single-company initiatives will not do the trick. The Unitaid pool will facilitate the development of combination pills and children's formulations of HIV/Aids medicines for use in developing countries, based on voluntary patent contributions from pharmaceutical companies. Those companies will receive royalty payments for doing so. The pool will also enable robust competition among drug producers to ensure that international resources to fight Aids, currently under severe strain, are spent as efficiently as possible.

The situation is urgent. An estimated 6 million people needing access to Aids treatment, including hundreds of thousands of children, still do not receive it. This number will only grow in the years to come. We ask GSK and other Aids drug patent-owners to work with us to make this initiative a success.' Ellen 't Hoen, Senior adviser IP & medicines patent pool, Unitaid
 

UNITAID

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