Push to ‘break’ HIV drug patent
As the number of people in New York City living with HIV or AIDS continues to rise, local advocates are calling for the federal government to take steps to make the lifesaving prevention drug PrEP more affordable.
City Council Speaker Corey Johnson joined other politicians and activists at the city’s AIDS Memorial in Greenwich Village on Monday to demand that the National Institutes of Health “break the patent” on the drug, which dramatically reduces the spread of HIV.
“It’s life or death for people who do not get access to this lifesaving medication that they need,” said Johnson (D-Manhattan), who is HIV-positive.
“Other countries pay $100 year for PrEP. Americans end up paying more than $20,000 a year for the same medication.”
There are more than 120,000 people living with HIV or AIDS in New York City, according to a recent report from the city Health Department, but only a small fraction of them take PrEP.
More than 2,100 New Yorkers were diagnosed with HIV in 2017, a 63% reduction from the number of people diagnosed in 2001.
Advocates say a major barrier between patients and PrEP is the cost of the drug, which is patented by Gilead Sciences and was approved for use by the federal Food and Drug Administration in 2012.
“Gilead Sciences charged over $2,000 a month for a drug that costs them less than $6 a month to make, and whose research was funded entirely by the federal government and other charities,” Christian Urrutia, co-founder of the PrEP4All Collaboration, said Monday.
Because the U.S. government funded the research for PrEP, federal law allows the National Institutes of Health to exercise “march-in” rights to break Gilead Sciences’ patent and allow other manufacturers to produce it at generic prices.
The legal maneuver dates to 1980 and the Bayh-Dole Act, which requires patent holders of federally backed drugs to allow third party companies to produce the drug when requested by the government.
The advocates are calling on the feds to make such a request for PrEP. If the price of the drug plummets for New Yorkers, advocates believe, the rate of new HIV infections would follow.
“Right now we only have 8,000 people [in New York State] on Medicaid using PrEP,” said Charles King, CEO of the nonprofit Housing Works. “We need to get that up to over 30,000 people. In order to do that, we have to spread PrEP around this state like candy on Halloween.”