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It should be known that India is considered the world's largest producer of generic drugs and that India’s public authorities are therefore fighting with great tenacity to defend the industry. It is worth recalling that Switzerland, the United Kingdom, France and Germany fiercely defend their pharmaceutical laboratories, which are among the largest in the world.

For reasons that are well understood, India is fighting for a cheap drug policy grounded in a seemingly irreproachable argument; leave us to manufacture and sell our generic drugs worldwide if we first aim to help the most disadvantaged populations, whether in India, Africa or elsewhere. Otherwise, these people will have no chance to access many drugs, for example those designed to combat HIV.

Obviously, the "Western" pharmaceutical industry has developed a quite different but apparently equally unbeatable line of reasoning: drugs finally allowed to be sold are the result of a lengthy process of scientific research that requires heavy investment.

Return on capital invested, which alone permits the long-term development of new molecules, obviously depends on the success or failure of each new drug. More particularly, it is the spectacular success of some drugs that enables further research for more "confidential" drugs.

The logics of these two "blocs" have inevitably clashed and this confrontation has contributed enormously to the stalemate in negotiations which have lasted for more than five years.

The positions of the negotiators were at one time so remote that some in India would have wanted to continue simply ignoring international patent law while on the other hand representatives of major “Western” pharmaceutical laboratories proposed substantially extending the duration of patents beyond the 20 years that is the current standard and leads data to fall into the public domain.

Nobody has yet found the miracle molecule that would allow negotiators from the different sides to come together and reach an agreement. Quite the opposite, it seems that once again it is left up to the courts to find a solution: thus, a major Swiss pharmaceutical laboratory recently took to the Indian Supreme Court to enforce its rights to industrial property. And a German one took also legal action. Needless to say, the issue at stake in this trial is very important for the thorny issue of generic drugs.

 

M.T.
For Indiary
September 2012

Top 20 Pharmas
based on 2010 revenues, in millions

1	Pfizer	$58,523
2	Novartis	$44,420
3	Merck & Co.	$39,811
4	Sanofi	$37,403
5	GlaxoSmithKline	$36,156
6	AstraZeneca	$32,515
7	Johnson & Johnson	$22,396
8	Eli Lilly & Co.	$21,685
9	Abbott Laboratories	$19,894
10	Bristol-Myers Squibb	$19,484
11	Teva	$16,121
12	Takeda Pharma	$14,829
13	Bayer Schering	$14,485
14	Boehringer-Ingelheim	$12,883
15	Astellas	$11,161
16	Daiichi-Sankyo	$10,794
17	EISAI	$8,542
18	Otsuka Pharmaceutical	$8,440
19	Gilead Sciences	$7,390
20	Mylan	$5,404

http://www.contractpharma.com/issues/2011-07/view_features/the-top-20-pharmaceutical-companies/

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