Sally Susman of Pfizer leads the most lethal lobbying effort on drug patents and prices. She’s also a big Obama campaign fundraiser.
For several years, Pfizer has been considered a hardliner among big pharma companies on international negotiations over intellectual property rights and drug pricing. This has not changed despite the company having had three CEOs in the past five years.
On Wednesday February 22, 2012, from 12:30pm to 2:30pm, KEI will host a roundtable discussion on international copyright negotiations. The location of the meeting will be 1621 Connecticut Ave, NW, Suite 500, Washington, DC 20009. There will be an opportunity to participate by telephone, via toll free calls in many countries. (To register or for details on call-in, email manon.ress@keionline.org. If you want to try to join by skype, we will do our best.)
The topics to be discussed are the following International copyright negotiations:
KEI has provided an affidavit in an India compulsory licensing dispute involving Natco and Bayer, for patents on the cancer drug sorafenib (sold by Bayer under the brand name Nexavar).
The Bayer price for sorafenib/Nexavar in India is $47 per 200 milligram tablet. At a daily dose of 4 tablets, this comes to $5,637 per month, or more than $68 thousand per year. In 2010, per capita income in India was $1,330.
Sangeeta Shashikant from TWN recently collected and published several NGO statements on the Africa IP Summit, in the TWO Info Service on Intellectual Property Issues (Feb12/03), which included a link also to a letter to WIPO signed by more than 100 NGOs. Continue Reading
On February 8, 2012, seven public health organisations submitted a letter to Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and the other thirty-nine members of this committee opposing H.R. 3699, the “Research Works Act.” This bill, originally introduced on December 16, 2011 by Rep. Issa and Rep. Maloney (D-NY) would prohibit federal agencies from conditioning its federal grants on recipients making its published research results available to the public. Continue Reading
In April of 2010, District Judge Timothy J. Corrigan (M.D Florida, Jacksonville division) declined to grant a permanent injunction following a finding that the Johnson & Johnson’s ACUVUE®OASYS contact lens product infringed patents owned by CIBA Vision Corporation, providing another example of, in effect, a judicial compulsory license following the 2006 eBay v. MercExchange case; the judge wrote:
This is a report from the FDA on 2011 new molecular entities (NMEs) approvals, through June 6, 2011. The total number of FDA approvals during that same period was 150. So far, 16 NMEs have been approved in five months, a sharp increase in approvals over the same period 2010.
6 NMEs NDAs were considered priorities
8 NDAs that were considered standard approvals
2 BLA (biologic products) that were not classified.
On July 1, 2010, William Yue, the Senior Counsel, Office of the Chief Counsel for International Commerce at the US Department of Commerce, wrote to Joel Blank and John Cobau about the ACTA negotiations. John Cobau was the Chief Counsel for International Commerce at the U.S. Department of Commerce, and Joel Blank was International Attorney-Advisor at US Department of Commerce.
A redacted version of this email was the only document released to KEI as part of a larger FOIA request concerning the Department of Commerce role in the ACTA negotiations. A copy is available here:
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Six NGOs, including Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), Oxfam, Third World Network (TWN), Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM), and Young Professionals Chronic Disease Network (YP-CDN), recently submitted recommendations to Member States to control non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in low- and middle-income countries in advance of the Moscow Ministerial conference.
A PDF of the joint statement with logos of the groups is available here:
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On April 1, 2011, Marietje SCHAAKE and Christian ENGSTRÖM submitted a parliamentary question on the appointment of Maria Martin-Part as the new head of unit for copy Continue Reading