The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in the drug patent case will be welcomed by large sections of people. By refusing to buckle to Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis AG’s plea, it granted relief to thousands of poor cancer patients in India and developing nations who can expect to keep spending only around Rs 8,000 a month on medicines by generic drugmakers rather than 15 times that amount for treatment with leukaemia “blockbuster” drug Glivec.
The stir this case generated is apparent from two judges recusing themselves, one for writing an article disfavouring multinationals and another who had submitted a paper at an MNC-backed conference aimed at “educating” people about intellectual property rights. That a saner view prevailed to deny what was just an “evergreening” patent rather than an original breakthrough discovery for the 1993 drug upholds our judiciary’s wisdom as well as the high bar the country has set in granting patents.
Major multinational drug companies aim to boost their sales with a premium in populous parts of the world like India, the size of whose drug market is projected to reach $74 billion a year by 2020, but they do so without much concern for furthering social aims, like making lifesaving drugs for treating cancer, HIV/AIDS and hepatitis more affordable for patients. Not without reason is India known as the “pharmacy of the world”. Its generic drugs are being exported ($10 billion a year) to many countries which are consequently able to keep the predatory MNC pharma giants at bay. Many of the arguments of these pharma giants are specious, and the cost they claim for putting lifesaving drugs on the market with US Food and Drug Administration approval is considered to be vastly exaggerated. Their reasoning that liberal rules on patents spur innovation also sounds suspicious as such “evergreen” patent applications as in the case of Glivec are clearly aimed at keeping their premium marketshare beyond the permitted cycle of the original patent. What should legally be paid for breakthrough drugs cannot be denied, but what this judgment does is set a precedent for denying clever applications for “copycat” patents.
It is fairly well known that the emerging markets are being targeted by drug manufacturers more intensively as their sales are falling in the developed world, on both sides of the Atlantic, with the intake of medicines going down according to 2012 figures. Unilateral price controls are of great import to nations with huge populations that simply cannot afford to pay for the pharma companies’ future research as well as profit-making that is often unconscionable. India has shown the way to the developing world, which can adapt such protective laws and procedures to help poor patients cope with deadly diseases.