E-drug: Johnson & Johnson Turns Its Back on AIDS Patients
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Dear all,
Find below a press release that MSF released today on J&J and the
Medicines Patent Pool. For more information, including a link to a letter
sent to J&J/Tibotec, visit this MSF website:
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/press/release.cfm?id=5209&enews=1
PRESS RELEASE - FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF)
Contact: Sandra Murillo +1-212-763-5765/+1-646-207-0405
JOHNSON & JOHNSON TURNS ITS BACK ON AIDS PATIENTS
Pharma Giants Refusal to Participate in Patent Pool Undermines Access to
Key AIDS Drugs
New York, NY, April 25, 2011 : Pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson is
putting the lives of people living with HIV at stake by refusing to
participate in the Medicines Patent Pool, a mechanism designed to lower
prices of HIV medicines and increase access to them for people in the
developing world, said the international medical humanitarian organization
Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) today.
Johnson & Johnson, which holds patents on three key new HIV drugs
desperately needed throughout the developing world, has so far refused to
license these patents to the Medicines Patent Pool. The Pool has been set
up to increase access to more affordable versions of HIV drugs, including
fixed-dose combinations that include multiple medicines in one pill, and
to develop much-needed pediatric HIV drugs. The Pool would license patents
on HIV drugs to other manufacturers and the resulting competition would
dramatically reduce prices, making them much more affordable in the
developing world. However, since the Pool is voluntary it will only work
if patent holders like Johnson & Johnson choose to participate.
High prices mean patients in poor countries continue to be relegated to
second-class care, with no choice but to take older, more toxic drugs we
would no longer use in the U.S., and with almost no treatment options when
the virus becomes resistant to the limited number of drugs available,
said Sophie Delaunay, executive director of MSF-USA. By putting its HIV
drug patents in the pool, Johnson & Johnson has a unique opportunity to
transform this situation and save lives worldwide. Instead, it has chosen
to turn its back on these patients.
Johnson & Johnson holds patents on HIV medicines rilpivirine, darunavir,
and etravirine. Rilpivirine is a promising antiretroviral (ARV) under
development for use in first-line treatment regimens. Darunavir and
etravirine are important for patients who have developed resistance to
their existing treatment.
Even at Johnson & Johnsons so-called reduced access pricing, the cost
of these drugs is prohibitive; darunavir is priced at $1,095 per patient
per year, and etravirine at $913 per patient per year in the worlds
least-developed countries, most of which are in sub-Saharan Africa. Many
developing countries have to pay even higher prices.
In December 2010, the National Institutes of Health, which holds the
intellectual property rights for a manufacturing process for darunavir,
put its patent for the AIDS drug in the patent pool. Johnson & Johnson
holds the drugs remaining patents, and is effectively blocking other
companies from manufacturing and making darunavir available at prices
affordable for patients in the developing world.
There are now more than six million people receiving lifesaving ARV
treatment worldwide. This would have been impossible without competition
from generic companies that helped bring prices down from $10,000 per
patient per year for the most commonly used first line regimen, to less
than $100 per patient per year. Today, mechanisms in international law and
additional voluntary initiatives such as the Medicines Patent Pool will be
crucial to ensuring that patients have access to newer, less toxic
medicines to keep them alive. Several drug companies have already begun
negotiating with the pool.
MSF now provides treatment to more than 170,000 people living with HIV
worldwide, and is beginning to witness the inevitable, natural phenomenon
of treatment failure, in which patients everywhere develop resistance to
treatment and need to graduate to newer regimens. This is happening now in
MSFs longest running HIV projects, in South Africa, Mozambique, Kenya,
and Cameroon.
We have patients who have no other treatment options other than Johnson &
Johnsons darunavir, which is so expensive that the South African
government cannot afford it, said Dr. Gilles van Cutsem, medical
coordinator for MSF programs in South Africa and Lesotho. MSF is now
paying for these drugs, but this is just the beginning of the problem. Ten
years after we put the first patients on antiretroviral treatment, we now
have patients in our clinics who have become resistant to drugs available
at affordable prices. Well soon be back in a situation where well have
to say there are drugs in the private sector, or in rich countries, that
could treat you, but we cannot afford them.
Judit Rius Sanjuan
U.S. Manager of the Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines
Medecins Sans Frontieres/ Doctors Without Borders
333 Seventh Ave, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10001 USA
Office: +1 212 655 3762 // Mobile: +1 917 331 9077
Email: judit.rius@newyork.msf.org