Drug Patents Are Good For Our Health
The Financial Times
by Miles White
Chairman & CEO, Abbott Laboratories
For the past several months, Abbott Laboratories has engaged in highly publicized negotiations with the government of Brazil over the purchase of Aids medications. This negotiation has just been concluded positively: Abbott further reduced the cost of treatment per patient and the government agreed to honor our patent. But we cannot let the agreement end discussion of the ideas involved; it is essential that we consider their implications so as to avoid situations that might not be so fortunately resolved. What hangs in the balance is how the world will continue to develop the medicines it needs. Abbott discovered and developed Kaletra, the most widely used protease inhibitor medication to fight Aids by blocking the replication of HIV. The government of Brazil said that it would break our patent and produce a generic version locally in order to treat more patients. Brazil moved from this position and agreed to an arrangement that meets not only its needs and ours, but the world’s - the need for continued innovation of new and better treatments for new and worse diseases.
Aids was a death sentence until late 1995, when the first of the HIV protease inhibitor medicines was introduced. Combined with other innovative medications, they helped turn HIV infection into a chronic, manageable disease for treated patients. That remarkable success against the greatest medical challenge of our time is the product of innovation, driven by the protection of intellectual property and the incentive it provides.
The negotiation raised a well-worn chorus of criticisms of the patent system, but failed to address the underlying question: how would our society continue to progress without it? The problem is that our global needs and global systems are in conflict. This threatens to harm one goal, innovation, in the name of another, access to medicine. Access is the goal the world cares about and one taken seriously by innovator companies (those that conduct research and development of new medicines) that have made significant contributions to this end across the developing world - from building healthcare infrastructure in Africa, to drastic price cuts that have benefited a wide range of countries, including Brazil. But it must be recognized that access is inseparable from innovation: without access, innovation is meaningless; without innovation, there is nothing to have access to.
As Abraham Lincoln recognized, in words chiseled into the Commerce Building in Washington: “The patent system added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius.” Since Lincoln’s birth, just 200 years ago, the way we live has progressed more than it did over millennia before. The difference has been technological progress; progress in medicine, in sanitation, in nutrition, in information, in hundreds of ways that have made our lives longer, healthier, safer and more comfortable. These improvements in the way we live are the result of continual innovation. That innovation has been made possible by intellectual property protection.
Read the rest of this article on drug patents.
