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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Patients' groups voice patent fears

Patients' groups voice patent fears

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published Published on Jan 24, 2015   modified Modified on Jan 24, 2015
-The Telegraph

New Delhi: Health and patients' rights groups have called on the government to resist American pressure that they claimed was aimed at weakening safeguards in India's patent laws that allow drug companies to sell inexpensive generic medicine.

Health activists representing patients' rights said they were concerned that bilateral talks on intellectual property rights, to feature during US President Barack Obama's visit to India beginning this weekend, may be rigged against access to affordable medicine for patients in India and other countries.

They said their concerns were based on a series of developments since Prime Minister Narendra Modi's return from a visit to the US in September 2014 that, they claimed, suggested that the US was accelerating its efforts to weaken or bypass India's pro-poor patent laws.

India's patent laws contain a section titled 3(d) that prohibits patents on minor variations of known drug molecules. Patients' rights groups view this as a safeguard, facilitating the production of generic inexpensive versions of medicines sold in India and many other countries.

Indian patent examiners have denied patents citing 3(d), which sections of foreign pharmaceutical industry see as a hindrance to innovation.

"(Narendra) Modi has portrayed himself as a strong man - we're calling on Modi to show his strength now and resist pressure from the US," said Anand Grover, director of Lawyers Collective, a network of lawyers that has represented patients' groups to challenge patent decisions in court.

Grover and others view bilateral mechanisms set up through the US-India Trade Policy Forum and an investigation into Indian patent laws initiated by the US International Trade Commission in October 2014 as signals of the growing US pressure on India to tweak the way it manages patents.

They said certain actions by the Indian government also suggested that it was willing to rethink India's patent regime. The government last year established a think-tank on intellectual property rights (IPR) and decided to defer a decision to allow generic production of an anti-cancer drug.

"We welcome President Obama as a representative of the US people, but we don't want him here as a representative of US pharmaceutical companies," said Amit Sengupta, a physician who is the convener of Jan Swasthya Abhiyan, or People's Health Network, a non-government group of health activists.

Grover said the draft national policy on intellectual property released by the government's new think-tank is "glaringly ignorant and promotes intellectual property as the only solution for innovation and creativity in India, contrary to the evidence".

International humanitarian groups are also concerned that weakened IPR policies in India would hurt patients in developing countries. "India has earned itself the title of the pharmacy of the world through its inexpensive generic drugs," said Leena Menghaney, an India representative with Medicins Sans Frontieres that procures drugs against malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV from India for patients in other developing countries.

"What we're witnessing now are intense efforts to find ways to weaken or bypass the patent law that was passed by the Indian Parliament - unanimously by members of all political parties," said Dinesh Abrol, the convener of the National Working Group on Patent Laws.


The Telegraph, 24 January, 2015, http://www.telegraphindia.com/1150124/jsp/nation/story_9985.jsp#.VMNmUC7xyBE


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