India’s Supreme Court has denied Swiss drug giant Novartis a patent for its leukaemia medicine Glivec. The court said the drug was merely a new form of an older treatment for the same condition, and so did not constitute a patentable invention.
Indian firms are thus free to keep making cheaper, generic versions of the drug. Novartis said the ruling “discourages future innovation in India”.
What the commentators said
Pharma is keen to offset slow growth in the developed world by tapping emerging market demand for new drugs, said Economist.com’s Schumpter blog. Governments want to bolster their own drug groups and lower the high costs of patented drugs.
And while “brawls over patent protections and prices have broken out” everywhere, “the fight is particularly fraught in India”. Drug sales are expected to expand from $16bn to $49bn by 2020, and it has the biggest generics industry in the world.
This ruling reinforces the impression of a “worrying regulatory backdrop” for pharma in India, said Abheek Bhattacharya in The Wall Street Journal. It follows a decision allowing a domestic firm to sell a generic version of Bayer’s cancer treatment Nexavar because the German company’s treatment was too expensive.
“Price is the wrong foundation for patent law,” which should be used to protect and thus encourage firms’ investment in research and development. India appears to be overdosing on regulation.
Indeed, said Lex in the FT. It has “a woeful record of ignoring international patents”: Glivec is patented in 40 countries. And the huge generic drugs sector “has prevented the development of an indigenous research-based” pharma industry. Its approach to healthcare consists merely of “copying the patented research of others”.