Essential Medicines News

Cipla is an Indian pharmaceutical company that took advantage of past Indian drug patent laws that made patents apply not to the chemical compounds themselves but to the processes used to manufacture them. In India, Cipla was able to sell its own version of other company’s drugs if it came up with a different way to make the same compound. Such drugs have included anti-cholesterol pills, antibiotics, AIDS treatments, asthma inhalers, and beta blockers, as well as oseltamivir, the drug thought to be effective against the bird flu. In producing such drugs cheaply, Cipla has been able to increase access to drugs and has partnered with the Clinton Foundation to bring AIDS drugs to Africa. Cipla has also help raise awareness about patents’ impact on drug access. The World Health Organization passed a resolution in May expressing concern about the “impact of high prices of medicines on access to treatment,” and declared that patents aren’t helping poor patients get new medicines.

“The third world cannot afford the prices of medications that are prevailing in the first world,” Hamied says. “So don’t talk about patents in isolation. Talk about access to medicine at affordable prices.”

“People are beginning to see that this is not a problem of very poor countries not being able to afford medicines,” says Ellen ‘t Hoen, policy director of the Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines at Doctors Without Borders. “It’s a question of who controls what and who has access to what, and that goes beyond developing countries.”