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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | The high price of Big Pharma greed -Leena Menghaney

The high price of Big Pharma greed -Leena Menghaney

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published Published on Mar 6, 2017   modified Modified on Mar 6, 2017
-The Hindu

In 2014, an Indian pharmaceutical company was globally the first to receive approval to market a biosimilar, thereby affordable version, of the breast cancer drug Trastuzumab. Almost immediately, Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche, innovator of the drug, filed a suit against the Indian Food & Drug Administration (FDA) to block its sale. The action firmly put their profits ahead of the lives of women with breast cancer.

Roche effectively embroiled India’s drug regulatory body and biosimilar producers in a long-drawn, expensive and increasingly complex litigation to try and prevent the marketing of potentially affordable versions of the cancer drug from competitors. The suit was aimed at questioning the ability of the Indian FDA to register biosimilars and made frivolous assertions regarding copyright infringement of its package insert by competitors.

After a wait of over three years, the Delhi High Court’s decision last week lifts some of the uncertainty surrounding the sale of the more affordable versions of the breast cancer drug in India. The court ruled that in view of the fact that the appropriate authority has approved the package insert and the drug for all three indications (metastatic breast cancer, early breast cancer and gastric cancer), the competitors should be permitted to sell Trastuzumab.

Young women in their thirties being diagnosed with breast cancer benefit from Trastuzumab as it reduces the risk of recurrence. Most patients struggle to pay for their surgery and chemotherapy and Roche was charging a staggering Rs. 10 lakh for 17 cycles of the medicine.

For poorer patients, this meant that despite a grant of partial treatment costs under the Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund (PMNRF), patients still fell short of money. Often, poor women diagnosed with breast cancer were not even told about the treatment option. One oncologist described it as being cruel to tell his patient that there was a drug that could potentially save her life but priced out of reach.

In South Africa, women like Tobeka Daki, a breast cancer patient who died fighting Roche, were denied a chance of survival, not for medical reasons but because Roche’s charged U.S. $38,365 for Trastuzumab.

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The Hindu, 5 March, 2017, http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/health/the-high-price-of-big-pharma-greed/article17409267.ece


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