Healthy Skepticism Library item: 489

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Publication type: news

Cancer drug monopoly: SC issues notice
TOI Mumbai 2004 May 7

Full text:

New Delhi: Concerned with the suffering of a large number of cancer patients, the supreme court on Friday issued notices to the Centre on a petition saying that by granting of exclusive marketing right (EMR) of an essential cancer drug, Gleevec, to Swiss multinational Novartis, the drug’s price would go up to Rs 1,20,000.

Gleevec’s existing price of Rs 4,000 is already beyond the hard pressed patients’ reach. Besides the Centre, notices have also been issued to the Drug Controller of India, Controller-General of Patents, Swiss drug concern Novartis AG and its Indian concern Novartis India Ltd.

A bench of Justices Y K Sabharwal and D M Dharmadhikari said it would take up the petition after a month.

Gleevec contains the crystalline form of a compound, Imatinib Meyslate, used for treating patients suffering from Chronic Myeloid Leukomia (CML), a lifethreatening form of cancer.

The Cancer Patients Aid Association (CPAA) said the price of this widely used drug would go out of patient’s reach by the grant of the EMR to Novartis AG. As a result, an overwhelming majority of 24,000 patients who suffer from CML every year in India would die, the petition added.

The petitioner sought a direction to the authorities to fix the price of the drug under the Patents Act so that patients could afford it. In an attempt to keep the price of essential medicines under check, the Centre recently told the court that it had added 75 new medicines to the essential drugs’ list after reviewing the Pharmaceutical Policy, 2002.

The then attorney-general Soli J Sorabjee said that under the new policy, drugs which had a moving annual turnover (MAT) of more than Rs 25 crore and a market share of more than 50% or more would come under the Drugs Price Control Order (DPCO) as against the earlier MAT benchmark of Rs 10 crore. This would result in a substantial increase in the number of drugs going out of DPCO.