Medicine patent pool could impair compulsory licensing, experts fear

CL has been proven to be a useful and powerful tool to reduce the price of overly expensive medicines and made them widely accessible to all people, they said.

CL and its benefits and effects were discussed by academics, agencies and non-governmental at the International Trade and Health Conference. 

Chalermsak Kittitrakul from the Aids Access Foundation warned that the medicine patent pool, which has been proposed as an alternative to make major drugs more affordable to the masses, may be more harmful than useful. 

Major drug companies that own patents sometime would normally set an agreement or condition preventing some medicines to be sold in certain countries.

“The medicine patent pool is another hope to ensure better drug access to the people by gathering important medicine patents within the pool. Sub-licensees can pay the patent owner for producing its patented medicine and selling it at a cheaper price,” he said.

“However, even though the idea sounds good, in reality the patent owners often draw up the agreements to bar medicine access in particular countries,” he said.

The introduction of a medicine patent pool may also affect the decision to use CL in the future, as the other side will claim that the country already has a voluntary licensing mechanism. That will decrease the legitimacy and efficiency of CL, he said.

“The country still has to count on CL to be the decisive action to lower important drug prices,” he said. 

Adun Mohara, a PhD candidate at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said that based on his research, CL for important drugs has greatly benefited the people and the country, however, there are also some negative impacts.

“According to empirical evidence on the previous CL in Thailand, the patients had direct advantages from CL, as they could access cheaper healthcare, which resulted in a positive impact on patients’ health,” he said.

Natnapis Suchonwanich, assistant secretary-general of the National Health Security Office, said CL’s implementation in 2007 had statistically increased the access rate among patients under the Universal Healthcare scheme to CL drugs such as Efavirenz, Lapinavir and Clopidogrel.

Thailand had invoked CL eight years ago for seven important remedies for Aids, cancer and strokes. These drugs are imported at a lower price from suppliers in India by the Government Pharmaceutical Organisation. Natnapis said CL also helped the members of other heath security schemes because the government can now afford to provide these once very expensive and barely accessible drugs to all people.

However, Adun warned that pharmas would cut their research of neglected diseases if they will not profit from selling these drugs.

“Therefore, the government has to carefully consider before doing CL in the future because it is not just cuts in trade privileges or patent infringement allegations that we will face,” he said.