PRIVATE PATENTS AND PUBLIC HEALTH

part to the way that innovation is currently rewarded through the patent
system.
Patents are a form of intellectual property (IP). IP refers to the legal
rights that result from intellectual activity in the industrial, scientific,
literary and artistic fields. IP has two branches: industrial property (e.g.
inventions (patents), trademarks, industrial designs, geographical indications)
and copyright (and related rights). IP law aims at safeguarding
creators and other producers of intellectual goods and services by granting
them certain time-limited rights to control the use made of those
innovations. Patents are relevant to access to medicines because they can
increase the price of a medicine.
Governments grant patents to people who invent something new, nonobvious
and useful. A patent holder can prevent others from making,
using, importing, or selling their invention for a certain period of time
without his or her consent. In exchange, the public is meant to benefit
from the sharing of scientific advancements. The patent system is
intended to strike a balance between incentivising innovation, protecting
innovators, and ensuring maximum public benefit from innovation.
Today’s system, particularly within the area of pharmaceutical
innovation, is out of balance. It provides excessive financial rewards to
patent holders, mostly large pharmaceutical companies. Patent holders
may use the de facto monopoly created by the patent to ask the highest
possible price for their products, which excludes those who cannot pay
from access.
This is particularly hard-felt in developing countries where people
often pay out of pocket (rather than through insurance or social security)
and cannot afford to pay high prices for medicines that are under patent.
But high pricing of medicines is increasingly posing challenges for highincome
countries too.
A recent example is sofosbuvir, a medicine that is part of a 12-week
treatment of hepatitis C, which can cause a potentially lethal infection of
the liver. The production cost of sofosbuvir is estimated to be US$ 68–136 4
for a course of treatment. However, the company that holds the patent
sells it for up to US$ 84,000 5 , a difficult price for even developed countries
to afford. 6 The cancer drug imatinib (brand name Gleevec in the United
States (US), Canada and South Africa; Glivec elsewhere; hereafter Glivec)
also demonstrates the huge differences between a monopoly price and a
generic price. South Africa pays over US$ 3,227 per patient per month for
the branded product Glivec, while in India where the patent was not
INTRODUCTION
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