Locost: Low-Cost Standard Therapeutics

When I was an undergrad I was involved with a student group called UAEM (Universities Allied for Essential Medicines) that tried to pressure universities to cater their research policies to developing country needs. Part of our activities involved pressuring Columbia to play around with its patenting and licensing policies. Generally when a researcher at a university discovers a promising new chemical that might treat some disease, the university patents the chemical, giving itself ownership for 20 years. Since it usually doesnt have a large enough research budget to conduct all the safety and efficacy trials needed for FDA approval, it then licenses the chemical to a private pharmaceutical company, which does the rest of the work. In exchange, the company is usually the sole producer and distributor of the medicine for the remainder of the 20-year patent period, paying the university royalties from its sales.

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.

(OPD Clinic at CORD with 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/