From Open Society.org
Should pharmaceutical patents—which result in monopolistic pricing of medicines—apply to any new drug, regardless of how it was made and whether it offers anything new?
This question was answered recently in a courageous decision by the Intellectual Property Appellate Board of India (IPAB), in a suit brought by Open Society Foundations’ grantee the Lawyers Collective on behalf of Sankalp Rehabilitation Trust, a Mumbai organization that works with drug dependent patients. In this case, IPAB ruled to revoke the patent held by the pharmaceutical company Roche for its hepatitis C drug, Pegasys, on the grounds that the process used to develop the medicine was not novel or innovative enough to warrant a patent. Since patented Pegasys costs between US$10,000-15,000 per treatment, this ruling is an important first step toward making hepatitis C medicines more accessible by allowing for future production of more affordable generics.
This question was answered recently in a courageous decision by the Intellectual Property Appellate Board of India (IPAB), in a suit brought by Open Society Foundations’ grantee the Lawyers Collective on behalf of Sankalp Rehabilitation Trust, a Mumbai organization that works with drug dependent patients. In this case, IPAB ruled to revoke the patent held by the pharmaceutical company Roche for its hepatitis C drug, Pegasys, on the grounds that the process used to develop the medicine was not novel or innovative enough to warrant a patent. Since patented Pegasys costs between US$10,000-15,000 per treatment, this ruling is an important first step toward making hepatitis C medicines more accessible by allowing for future production of more affordable generics.
