Pharmaceutical News 2.0

By Thompson Ayodele | From today’s Wall Street Journal Europe

LAGOS, Nigeria, Today, as we mark World AIDS Day, we should take stock of the suffering this disease continues to inflict, particularly in developing countries.

Twenty-five years after the disease was first discovered, AIDS continues to claim around two million lives each year. As an African, I’ve witnessed the suffering first-hand. My home region of sub-Saharan Africa has 12% of the world’s population, but accounts for two-thirds of those infected with AIDS and 75% of all AIDS-related deaths.

Western activists continue to blame the high price of drugs for the disease’s continued prevalence in Africa. They argue that poor countries should be permitted to break pharmaceutical patents to produce cheap knock-off versions at home.

Unfortunately, the activists are not just wrong; their policy proposal is flat-out dangerous. The real causes of restricted access to AIDS drugs are Africa’s derelict transportation systems, widespread corruption and poor utility infrastructure.

Most of the high-quality AIDS drugs that Africa imports have to be transported over vast distances and stored for extended periods of time before they can be distributed. But the roads and warehouses in most African countries are poorly maintained. Electricity, needed to keep drugs refrigerated, is scarce. Corrupt officials often exploit weaknesses in the supply chain, and extort hefty bribes from aid personnel.

Read more about drug patents and AIDS in Africa.

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This week Switzerland will become ground zero for the future of health policy in Africa. The World Health Organisation’s (WHO) intergovernmental working group is meeting in Geneva to discuss public health, medical innovation and intellectual property.

Many participants are expected to express their support for efforts to undermine patent protections for drugs. In doing so, however, these attendees ignore the more fundamental problem facing poor African nations — dilapidated healthcare infrastructure.

The anti-patent crowd believes that patents keep prices high and drugs out of the reach of the poor. It blames pharmaceutical firms for the suffering of the impoverished and calls on developing nations to employ patent-revoking compulsory licences that encourage the production of cheaper generics.

But even if medicine were available for free, as it often is in poor nations, dysfunctional institutions and personnel ensure that the needy can’t access it.

Despite unprecedented quantities of monetary aid to the ministries of health of many African countries, health systems on the continent have languished. Between 1990 and 2005 development assistance for health increased from $2,5-billion to more than $13-billion. Overall about 10% of Africa’s healthcare expenditure is financed by donor aid.

And yet more than 50% of Africans lack access to essential medicines, according to the WHO. Around the world more than 10-million children in developing countries die unnecessarily from diseases that are easily preventable and cheap to treat, such as diarrhoea, measles and malaria. Furthermore, up to 80% of Africans have to pay for treatment from their own pockets. In short, public health systems are failing to deliver.

Read the rest of this article on drug patents in Africa.

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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.

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