March 6, 2012, 11:57 PM

Supreme Court to Hear Dispute on Drug Patents

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

As China was becoming the world’s shop floor, “India took its place as the world’s pharmacy, and in recent decades has been the largest provider of cheap, lifesaving medicines in poor countries across the globe,” Vikas Bajajand Andrew Pollack write in The New York Times.

But most of that medicine has been generic copies of brand-name drugs protected by patents in Europe and the United States, they write. “Now a big Swiss drug company, Novartis, may be one legal step away from upending the Indian supply chain by forcing the Indian government to recognize a patent for a cancer treatment heralded as a breakthrough for people with a deadly form of leukemia.”

The case, involving the drug Gleevec, is before the Indian Supreme Court, which is preparing to hear final arguments this month. It represents a high-stakes showdown between defenders of intellectual property rights, who say the generic knockoffs stifle innovation by drug makers, and Indian drug companies and international aid groups, who warn that a ruling in favor of Novartis could dry up the global supply of inexpensive medicines to treat AIDS, cancer and other diseases.

India is the world’s third-largest drug producer by volume and exports about $10 billion worth of generic medicines every year, more than any other country, primarily selling to other fast-growing developing countries that are expected to become significant new markets for big drug companies. Doctors Without Borders says that 80 percent of the generic AIDS drugs it supplies to an estimated 170,000 people in Africa and elsewhere are made in India.

The case before the Supreme Court involves a section in India’s patent law that prohibits a newer form of a known substance from receiving a patent unless it significantly improves the medicine’s “efficacy,” or effectiveness. The standard was aimed at preventing a practice known as evergreening, in which a pharmaceutical company makes minor changes to existing drugs and earns new patents, thereby providing many more years of protection from generic competition.