This neat arrangement is usually sad for poor people, because the company's monopoly allows it to charge super high prices as a payoff for its research and development work. Part of UAEM's mission it to try to get universities to put more pressure on the pharma companies to relax their patent enforcement, especially in developing countries.
We had some success during my last year in school, as Columbia decided it would start trying a policy called mandatory sublicensing. The basic idea was this: if a government or ngo or someone complained that a company was not making a drug available at a reasonable price in their country, the university would reserve the right to issue another license to a producer who would only produce and sell for "humanitarian" uses.
This confused me at the time, as I had never heard of a pharmaceutical producer that wasn't a profit-making company, and wasn't sure who these humanitarian entities would be. At some point last year I was talking with another friend from UAEM, who realized that UAEM did a lot of clamoring for allowing more companies and producers to make and sell drugs in developing countries, but we didn't really have a clear idea of who these producers would be.
Which brings me to my point: When I was at Prayas, I was in touch via email with a man named Chinu, who helped me with the medicine pricing FAQ I was writing. He had written a book called "A Layperson's Guide to Medicines", which helped consumers understand issues like quality control, medicine pricing, branded vs. generic, research policies, etc. He ran an organization called Locost, which in addition to making helpful resources and engaging in pharmaceutical policy advocacy, actually produces essential medicines and sells them with little mark-up to NGOs working with the urban and rural poor in India. Eureka! This was just the type of producer referred to in the Columbia policy.
What was particularly cool was that at both Vivekananda Girijana Kelyana Kendra and Chinmaya Organization for Rural Development, the hospitals and OPD clinics stocked Locost drugs.
Thus I encountered the organization at all three NGOs I visited, and thought that this kind of impact deserved its own post. Here is their website for anyone whose interested:
http://www.locostindia.com/
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ReplyDeleteAkash, informative post, especially your examples of orgs that are stocking LOCOST products. I wonder if you can put me in touch with Chinu?
ReplyDeleteI been researching approaches to make medicines cheaper for patients, especially in the context of poorer nations. For example, encouraging the use of unbranded generics over the usual branded generics. I came across LOCOST as an example of health/pharma innovation. I would like to know whether (1) doctors in India are aware of LOCOST, (2) are doctors in urban India trusting and prescribing LOCOST products, (3) are its products sold via regular retail pharmacies in urban India, and (4) are there other companies manufacturing and retailing trustworthy low-cost medicines and how does LOCOST compete with them and with the larger profit-hungry pharma companies (with their deep networks)?
Thanks for your insights and any help in this regard.
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