Translator: Nam Thai Reviewer: Nada Qanbar
We keep flying.
In 2002, a group of treatment activists
met to discuss the early development of the airplane.
The Wright brothers, in the beginning of the last century,
had, for the first time, managed to make one of those devices fly.
They also had taken out numerous patents on essential parts of the airplane.
They were not the only ones; that was common practice in the industry,
and those who held patents on airplanes were defending them fiercely,
and suing competitors left and right.
This actually wasn't so great
for the development of the aviation industry.
And this was at a time that in particular the US government was interested
in ramping up the production of military airplanes.
There was a bit of conflict there.
The US government decided to take action,
and forced those patent holders to make their patents available
to share with others, to enable the production of airplanes.
So what is this got to do with this?
[AIDS TREATMENT NOW]
In 2002, Nelson Otwama - a Kenyan Social Scientist
discovered he had HIV and needed access to treatment.
He was told that a cure did not exist.
AIDS, he heard, was lethal and treatment was not offered.
This was at a time the treatment actually existed in rich countries.
AIDS had become a chronic disease.
People in our countries here in Europe and North America were living with HIV,
healthy lives, not so for Nelson; he wasn't rich enough,
and not so for his three years old son, he discovered a year later, also had HIV.
Nelson decided to become a treatment activist,
and joined up with other groups.
In 2002, they were facing a different battle.
Prices for ARVs, the drug needed to treat HIV,
costs about $12,000 per patient per year.
The patents on those drugs
were held by a number of Western pharmaceutical companies,
that were not necessarily willing to make those patents available.
When you have a patent, you can exclude anyone else
from producing or making low cost versions
available of those medications.
Clearly, this led to patent wars breaking out all over the globe.
Luckily, those patterns did not exist everywhere.
There were countries that did not recognize
pharmaceutical product patents, such as India.
Indian pharmaceutical companies
started to produce so-called generic versions,
low cost copies of anti-retroroviral medicines,
and make them available in the developing world.
And within a year, the price had come down
from $10,000 per patient per year to $350 per patient per year.
Today, that same triple pill cocktail is available for $60 per patient per year,
and, of course, that started to have an enormous affect
on the number of people who could afford access to those medicines.
Treatment program became possible, funding became available.
The number of people on anti-retroviral drugs
started to increase very rapidly.
Today, eight million people have access to anti-retroviral drugs,
34 million are infected with HIV,
never has this number been so high but actually this is good news
because what it means is people stop dying.
People who have access to these drugs stop dying,
and there's something else; they also stop passing on the virus.
This is fairly recent science that had shown that.
What it means is we have the tools to break the back of this epidemic.
So what's the problem?
Well, things have changed. First of all, the rules have changed.
Today, all countries are obliged
to provide patents for pharmaceuticals that last at least 20 years.
This is as a result of intellectual properties rule
of the World Trade Organization.
So what India did is no longer possible.
Second, the practices of patent holding companies have changed
Here you see the patent practices before
the World Trade Organization's rules,
before '95; for anti-retroviral drugs.
This is what you see today, and this is in developing countries.
So what that means is unless we do something deliberate,
and unless we do something now, we will very soon be faced
with another drug price crisis.
Because new drugs are developed and new drug goes to market,
but these medicines are patented in a much wider range of countries.
So unless we act, unless we do something today,
we will soon be faced with some treatment time bomb.
It isn't only the number of drugs that are patented,
there are something else that can really scare generic manufactures away.
This shows you a patent landscape. This is the landscape of one medicine.
So you can imagine that if you are a generic company about to decide
whether to invest in the development of this product,
unless you know that the licenses to these patents
are actually going to be available,
you will probably choose to do something else.
Again, deliberate action is needed.
So surely, if a patent pool could be established
to ramp up the production of military airplanes,
we should be able to do something similar to tackle the HIV-AIDS epidemic.
And we did.
In 2010, UNITAID established the medicines patent pool for HIV.
And this is how it works:
patent holders, inventors that develop new medicines;
patents those inventions but make those patents available
to the Medicines Patent Pool.
The Medicines Patent Pool then license those out
to whoever need access to those patents.
That can be generic manufactures, it can also be
non-profit drug development agencies, for example.
Those manufactures can then sell those medicines at much lower cost
to people who need access to them,
to treatment program that need access to them.
They pay royalties over the sales to the patent holders,
so they are remunerated for sharing their intellectual property.
There is one key difference
with the airplane patent pool.
The Medicines Patent Pool is a voluntary mechanism
The airplanes patent holders were not left a choice
whether they licensed their patents or not, they were forced to do so.
That is something that the Medicines Patent Pool cannot do.
It relies on the willingness of pharmaceutical companies
to license their patents to make them available for others to use.
Today, Nelson Otwama is healthy.
He has access to anti-retroviral drugs, his son will soon be 14 years old.
Nelson is a member of the expert advisory group
of the Medicines Patent Pool,
and he told me not so long ago:
"Ellen, we rely, in Kenya, and many other countries, on the Medicines Patent Pool
to make sure that new medicines also become available to us.
That new medicines, without delay, become available to us."
And this is no longer fantasy.
Already, I'll give you an example:
In August of this year,
the United States drug agency approved a new four-in-one AIDS medication.
The company, Gilead, that holds the patents
has licensed the intellectual property to Medicines Patent Pool
The pool is already working today,
two months later with generic manufactures to make sure that
this product can go to market at low cost, where and when it is needed.
This is unprecedented; this has never been done before.
The rule is about a ten year delay
for a new product to go to market in developing countries, if at all.
This has never been seen before.
Nelson's expectations are very high and quite rightly so.
He and his son will need access to the next generation
anti-retrovirals, and the next throughout their lifetime,
So that he and many others in Kenya and other countries
can continue to live healthy, active lives.
Now, we count on the willingness of drug companies to make that happen.
We count on those companies that understand
that it is in the interest, not only in the interest of the global good,
but also in their own interest to move from conflict to collaboration.
And through the Medicines Patent Pool, they can make that happen.
They can also choose not to do that,
but those that go down that road may end up
in a similar situation the Wright brothers ended up with
early last century, facing forcible measures by government.
So, they better jump now
Thank you.
(Applause)