Gilead Sciences, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, is being sued by about 26,000 people in the US for deliberately delaying the launch of a promising drug to fight HIV to prioritize profits. The information comes from the New York Times.
What happened:
In 2004, the pharmaceutical company stopped producing a new drug to fight the virus claiming that its effectiveness was not significantly different from a product already on the market, whose patent belonged to the company itself and would take a long time to expire.
Behind Gilead’s justification, however, was a plan to maximize the company’s profits. According to the lawsuit, the company wanted to manipulate the US patent system to protect profitable monopolies on topselling drugs.
That year, Gilead was responsible for two major HIV treatments based on a version of tenofovir. Executives knew that the new drug could potentially be less toxic to patients’ kidneys and bones compared to the drug already on the market.
However, there are fears that the new drug could compete with tenofovirGilead delayed launching the product for years.
The idea would have been to postpone the launch until shortly before the patents for drugs already on the market expired. This allowed Gilead to switch patients to the new product just before generics hit the market.
The new treatment was only announced in 2015, nearly a decade after production ceased. The patents on this product are valid until 2031.
The complaint highlights the threat of unnecessary risk
About 26,000 patients who were taking older Gilead drugs sued the company because of the allegedly deliberately delayed releaseaccusing them of being unnecessarily exposed to kidney and bone problems by the company.
In the lawsuit, Gilead’s attorneys dismissed the allegations, calling them “baseless.” The defense denied that the company intentionally halted production of the drug to boost patent profits. They filed an internal memo in 2004 estimating that if the drugmaker launched the new version in 2008, it could increase its sales by $1 billion within six years.
Had Gilead continued development of the drug in 2004, the patents on the promising drug would have expired or were about to expire. The delay gives the company a few more years of exclusivity over the product, preventing generic marketing.