The Battle of 1498 | Alternet

/battle-1498

  • The Battle of 1498 | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/personal-health/battle-1498

    Hepatitis C is a blood virus that affects 3.5 million Americans and kills more of them than every other virus combined. So when $62 million in government basic research led to the direct-action drug sofosbuvir, which successfully treats the disease, Hep C advocates thought global eradication might be at hand.
    Report Advertisement

    Then something awful happened: the patent-and-profit system worked exactly as designed.

    In 2011, the California-based drug giant Gilead bought the small bio-med company then in the process of bringing sofosbuvir through trials. When Gilead introduced sofosbuvir to market a few years later, it came with a price tag upwards of $100,000; even with discounts, the drug was priced well beyond the reach of most people. It also strained and busted Medicaid budgets across the country.

    Gilead and Janssen, the other company selling patented Hep C treatments, have since made more than $70 billion selling the new Hep C drugs, which happen to be incredibly cheap to produce. How cheap? So cheap, one study estimates they can be produced for between $62 and $216; another study, conducted at Liverpool University, places the cost below $100.

    Khanna continued, “The Hep C drugs present a pretty simple moral issue that highlights the need for reform. When the vast majority of scientific research in this country is being done at universities with NIH funding supported by taxpayer money, we shouldn’t be privatizing the gains. Millions of people need these drugs. We need to prioritize the public good.”

    #Big_Pharma #Hépatite_C #Brevets #Propriété_intellectuelle