E-drug: Cipla price cut
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[Cross-posted from Pharm-policy. Copied as fair use. HH]
Cipla cuts triple-drug AIDS therapy prices by 39%
Gauri Kamath
July 13, 2001
MUMBAI
CIPLA, India's third largest drugmaker, has slashed the prices of its
anti-AIDS drugs in the country for the fourth time in the past nine
months.
This time round, the company has cut prices of its triple drug
regimen by as much as 39 per cent. The three-drug combination of
lamivudine, stavudine and nevirapine which has the potential to
reduce the HIV virus in the body to very low levels, will now cost
the patient Rs 2,130 per month down from Rs 3,495 per month.
Cipla has also cut prices of other anti-AIDS drugs zidovudine,
indinavir, and didanosine which it sells in India. The
across-the-board price cuts which range from 14 per cent to 54 per
cent were put into effect three days ago, a Cipla official said.
The most hefty price reduction has been on the stavudine range.
Stavudine is one of the drugs used to prevent HIV from spreading
to uninfected cells in the human body. The prices have been cut by
roughly 50 per cent for different dosages of the drug.
Cipla has also launched a combination of two drugs lamivudine and
stavudine for the first time in India to improve patient compliance.
On the anvil is another drug efavirenz.
All these drugs have been launched in the global market by
research-driven multinationals and patented by them. In India,
product patents are not recognised giving companies like Cipla a
chance to replicate these drugs by a different process at a fraction
of the multinationals' costs.
Cipla has been dominating the anti-AIDS drugs market for several
years as it was the first to launch an anti-AIDS drug in the country
in the early part of the nineties. The company has continuously
slashed prices to push demand.
Though India has the second largest number of HIV-infected
persons in the world, sales of AIDS drugs in India have failed to
pick up because of a combination of socio-economic factors.
Of late a clutch of Indian companies such as Aurobindo Pharma,
Hetero Drugs, Zydus Cadila and Ranbaxy Laboratories has also
forayed into the market for finished dosage forms with competitive
prices.
The Cipla official however said the company's formulations for
HIV/AIDS patients were the cheapest in the market place. He also
said Cipla's price cuts were not the result of competition but
technological and process improvements.