![]() patent enables a company to sell it exclusively for a set period of time, typically for 20 years from the date it was filed. But the patent system, Krishtel says, is one culprit.ĭrug patents allow companies to recoup the costs of inventing a drug and reap rewards for innovation. The reasons for high prescription drug prices in America are complex and varied. A 2019 Kaiser Family Foundation survey of more than a thousand Americans found that 29 percent did not take their medicines as prescribed at some point during the previous year because of cost 8 percent reported that the lapse made their illness worse. Hoping for a repeat, in 2015 Krishtel turned the organization’s focus to the United States, where skyrocketing drug prices increasingly threaten to drag families into financial ruin. Related Is Your Medicine Worth Its Price? Through a combination of patent expirations and legal challenges, price competition in India drove down the cost of the most common HIV therapy by more than 80 percent between 20. By 2007, she came up with a strategy to slash the cost of HIV drugs in India: On behalf of patients’ rights groups, lawyers with the nonprofit Initiative for Medicines, Access, and Knowledge (I-MAK) she had cofounded would challenge specific patent applications on brand-name drugs, opening opportunities for generic manufacturers. ![]() Krishtel and the collective of lawyers she was working with at the time went on to handle many similar cases. With no other options, they wanted Krishtel to draw up guardianship transfer papers: The rambunctious siblings were to be sent to an orphanage before their parents died.Įven though drugs that could save the parents’ lives were available, the cost at the time was out of reach for the couple, who were living in poverty. Unable to afford life-saving medicine to keep their HIV infections in check, the parents were dying of AIDS. One day in 2004, she recalls a couple walking into her office in Bengaluru with their three children. P riti Krishtel’s first case as a legal aid lawyer in India was as tragic as they come. What should the drug be priced at to recoup the drug company’s investment and pay for its continuing production? How many generic drug manufacturers will get in line to produce a drug for 5000 patients? ![]() Let’s say that there are an average of 5,000 living with this disease in the US. Now with regards to the man with Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia, an average of 1000 to 1500 people in the US are diagnosed with this disease every year, the typical age to receive such a diagnosis is 70. Other than the fact that it takes a considerable amount of money for a generic drug manufacturer to produce a drug and get it approved by the FDA and other regulatory bodies. When Big Pharma files a new patent for a revised and “improved” drug, there is nothing preventing another company to produce the old drug using the expired patent. If a company can’t make a big enough profit from producing a drug, they don’t spend the research and development dollars to bring that drug to market. Why? Because Big Pharma can make a profit in these countries.
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