Indian Patients Suffer from India’s Weak Pharmaceutical Patents – Forbes
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India’s recently elected Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, will visit the U.S. later this month. One of the sticking points in the U.S.-India relationship is weakness in India’s laws governing intellectual property (IP). The Global Intellectual Property Center of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ranks 25 countries in its Global IP Index, and India comes in last place. Indian growth will continue to lag as long as this persists: Researchers have demonstrated the positive relationship between IP protection and a county’s prosperity.
One of India’s weak spots is patent protection for new prescription drugs. New research also shows, counter-intuitively, that this limits patients’ access to new medicines. Professors Ernst R. Berndt and Ian M. Cockburn analyzed the 184 new medicines approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration between 2000 and 2009. It took more than five years for half of those drugs to become available in India.
Ten years after being launched in the U.S. or elsewhere, almost one quarter of the new medicines were still not available in India…
Read more – Forbes