corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 20438

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

AstraZeneca’s cancer drug patent rejected
The Deccan Herald 2012 Nov 28
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/295062/astrazenecas-cancer-drug-patent-rejected.html


Full text:

India’s patents appeal board has dismissed British drugmaker AstraZeneca’s petition challenging an earlier ruling that refused patent protection for a cancer-fighting drug, in the latest blow for Big Pharma in the country.

The Indian patents office in 2007 refused patent protection to AstraZeneca’s quinazoline molecule, citing lack of invention. The Intellectual Property Appellate Board (IPAB) on Monday upheld the refusal.

The decision is also a setback for struggling AstraZeneca, which is battling to turn itself around as key drugs lose patent protection.

Global drug companies suffered a high-profile reversal in March when India granted the first ever compulsory licence to domestic drugmaker Natco Pharma to sell cheap copies of Bayer’s cancer drug Nexavar. Bayer has appealed the order.

And early this month IPAB revoked a six-year-old Indian patent granted to Roche’s hepatitis C drug Pegasys, citing lack of evidence that the drug was any better than existing treatments.

Multinational drug manufacturers regard India’s $13 billion drug market as a huge opportunity, but are wary of what they see as lax protection for intellectual property in a country where generic medicines account for more than 90 percent of sales. Indian generic companies, which do not need to plough money into future research, can produce drugs at a fraction of the cost of originator firms like Roche or Bayer.

Natco and another domestic drugmaker, G M Pharma, had opposed the initial patent application for AstraZeneca quinazoline derivative. The London-listed company filed a review petition, which India’s patent office dismissed in 2011.

A challenge to a review petition does not come under the purview of the IPAB, and even on merit the petition has failed, S Majumdar & Co, the counsel for Natco Pharma, said in a statement.

AstraZeneca could not immediately be reached for a comment by Reuters. The company has the option to take its case to India’s Supreme Court.

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Email a Friend








Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909