Gilead Kickstarts Patent Pool for AIDS Drugs

In a move that may signal a change in how the developing world accesses treatment, Gilead Sciences - the leading maker of HIV drugs - has announced it will share its intellectual property rights with the new Medicines Patent Pool. Gilead is the first drugmaker to sign on with MPP, an initiative of the UNITAID health financing system that is funded by a tax on airline tickets. MPP’s aim is to create a patent pool that licenses technologies to generic drugmakers to make medicines more widely available to poor patients worldwide.

Gilead will allow for generic copies of the HIV drugs tenofovir, emtricitabine, cobicistat, and elvitegravir, in addition to a combination of these drugs in a single pill known as “Quad.” Cobicistat, Quad, and elvitegravir are still in clinical development, and their inclusion should significantly speed the flow of new treatments to the poor.

“Through systematic licensing of intellectual property related to HIV products, people in developing countries will have access to low-cost versions of those products almost at the same time that people in rich countries do,” said MPP Executive Director Ellen ‘t Hoen.

Gilead will receive a 3 percent royalty on generic sales of tenofovir, which is also used to treat hepatitis B, and 5 percent on the other drugs.

‘t Hoen expects other pharmaceutical firms will follow Gilead’s lead. She is negotiating terms for similar deals with Bristol-Myers Squibb, Roche, Boehringer Ingelheim, Sequoia Pharmaceuticals, and ViiV Healthcare, a GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer joint venture. “The whole field is changing ... there will be more to follow,” she said.

Drugmakers, who previously negotiated voluntary licensing deals on a case-by-case basis, have had difficulty accepting the concept of a “one-stop” pooling system. The US National Institutes of Health was the first organization to join MPP last September.

The Friends of AIDS Foundation is dedicated to enhancing the quality of life for HIV positive individuals and empowering people to make healthy choices to prevent the spread of the HIV virus. To learn more about The Friends of AIDS Foundation, please visit: http://www.friendsofaids.org.


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