Why You Should Not Buy Cheap Cancer Drugs

In the developing world like India, infectious diseases like tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS can be treated with comparatively cheaper drugs. In past few years, health officials have refused to give patents to two breast cancer drugs. This decision is to limit patents on the costly branded medicines. Such move is creating another tension, where it is being found out that cancer-related deaths are more often in India than US. That’s the reason makes the medicine makers focus their sales growth in medium developed nations.

One of the rejections occurred when a member of Indian federal board of patent officially canceled a patent on a medicine for breast cancer named lapatinib, sold as Tykerb. It is sold by the famous pharmaceutical company named Glaxo Smith Kline. Another drug is trastuzumab, which is sold as Herceptin was not granted the patent, as accused by Roche, a Swiss drug company. It states that a patent office which is situated in Kolkata has declined to grant a patent for the medicine. The officials, however, have allowed other patents that will prevent both the medicines from the competition which is generic. This will continue till the year 2019. This action will allow an opportunity for the generic drugs manufacturers to step in beyond 2019.

The pressure is ever increasing on medicine companies to keep the pricing of medicines in such a way that the medicines will be charged differently in various part of the country depending on their income. A company like Roche claimed that they have already offered such pricing via special programmes. But their own business figure show that they have only sold medicines which covers only 15% of the patients who suffer from breast cancer. If the percentage can be turned into numbers, we can see that they have treated only 3700 Indian women.

Chronic Myeloid Leukemia is a type of cancer. It mostly affects blood. The age of the people who are affected by the cancer are in their 40s and 50s. Compare to another form of cancers, this particular one spreads very slowly. 4-5 people are affected by this disease in India out of 1,00,000 people. It includes 10% of total cancer population. The treatment which includes bone marrow transplant and targeted therapy. The therapy involves oral medicines and the medication continues for five years. But in few critical cases, the patient might need the medication for a lifetime.

Glivec is a medicine which cures chronic myeloid leukemia. Specific bone marrow cells get damaged and start producing white blood cells in an excessive manner. This action causes fatigue. It also causes hip pain in the initial stage. The impact used to be acute. But the medicine Glivec, its success rate is more than 95%.

The supreme court has rejected a patent against a life selling cancer drug. The name of the medicine is Glivec. Glivec is a medicine from the house of Novartis AG. This decision relieved a huge number of patients in India as well as other developing countries. The reason being, the decision has brought down the drug escalation cost to a great extent. But again, this is a very big setback for those multinational pharmaceutical companies, which were denied a patent for their series of medicines which are life-saving for a very long period of time.