[afro-nets] Gilead offers secrets to AIDS drug

["Claudio Schuftan" <claudio@hcmc.netnam.vn>]

Gilead offers secrets to AIDS drug
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* By Marni Leff Kottle*
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Bloomberg News

Published: August 8, 2006
*SAN FRANCISCO*
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Gilead Sciences, which makes the world's best- selling AIDS treatment, is offering to help makers of generic drugs in India produce the medicine, a move intended to get the life-saving pill to millions more people in the world's poorest countries.

Since 2004, Gilead has twice slashed its price for Truvada, a drug that combines the company's best- selling pill, Viread, and another medicine. Gilead now sells Truvada to African countries for 87 cents a day, compared with $24.51 in the United States.

Still, only 45,000 to 50,000 of the 6.5 million people in poor countries who need AIDS drugs to stay alive are receiving any of Gilead's medicines. To get the drug to more patients, Gilead is handing over its manufacturing secrets to generic companies who may be able to sell the drugs for even less.

"We think they can beat our prices and we would love to see that happen," said Gregg Alton, general counsel for Gilead, based in Foster City, California, who is working on the negotiations with 10 Indian drug makers. "We're going to teach them everything they need to know to make the product."

About 83 percent of patients at the stage of needing treatment are not getting drugs in Africa, where 24.5 million people are infected with HIV, according to the United Nations AIDS program.

About 38.6 million people worldwide have HIV and 25 million have died from AIDS since the condition was identified in 1981.

Gilead's offer to help generic companies manufacture its products is the latest step by drug makers to increase access to AIDS therapies. Previously, in addition to cutting prices, drug companies had granted permission to generic makers to copy medicines.

"It's a huge change," said Helene Gayle, former director of the HIV program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and now chief executive of Care, a nonprofit organization that works with impoverished women. "We just haven't seen this kind of willingness to cooperate before."

Among the makers of AIDS drugs, Bristol-Myers Squibb, based in New York, and Roche, based in Basel, Switzerland, say they are pursuing similar deals that involve handing over proprietary production data.

Bristol-Myers says it will assist two manufacturers, the India-based Emcure Pharmaceuticals and Aspen Pharmacare in South Africa, in making copies of its AIDS pills. "We didn't just send them the owner's manual, but we also sent them our technicians to work in their labs," said Donne Newbury, director of global HIV access programs at Bristol-Myers.

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Claudio Schuftan
mailto:claudio@hcmc.netnam.vn