Patent wars: affordable medicines versus intellectual property rights.

The pharmaceutical industry is increasingly looking towards emergingmarkets, where demand for new drugs is rising rapidly alongside rates of chronic disease. But in recent years India, known as the “pharmacy of the developing world,” has led the battle for affordable drugs, using legal mechanisms to overturn patents so that its generic drug companies (which produce a fifth of the world’s generic drugs) can undercut the Western giants. Developing countries have followed India’s example, and battles over patent protection and prices have broken out from Indonesia to Brazil. The fight echoes the one over access to treatments for HIV infection a decade or two ago, but it is now being fought over a far wider range of drugs with greater financial implications for Western drug companies. In a series of high profile court cases, India has rejected several patent claims for cancer drugs and Roche decided in August not to pursue a patent application for its breast cancer drug trastuzumab (Herceptin) because it viewed it as a losing battle in India’s current intellectual property environment. 2 Public health arguments