Data exclusivity —the granting of exclusive rights to commercial companies over clinical and preclinical trial data— could jeopardize efforts to create generic versions of life-saving medicines and harm public health....[D]ata exclusivity could impede efforts to produce generic versions of the "flu drug" oseltamivir in the event of a global flu pandemic, and data exclusivity is already preventing patients from getting access to generic HIV medicines.
Before registering a pharmaceutical product and allowing it on the market, regulatory authorities verify its quality, safety, and efficacy. In the case of a new medicine, safety and efficacy are established via preclinical and clinical trials; hence submission of the trial data is an important prerequisite for registration. Because of data exclusivity, regulatory agencies cannot rely on clinical data from the company that originally registered the drug to approve the marketing of the generic, and so these generic manufacturers must carry out their own safety and efficacy studies.
Generic manufacturers are thus obliged to repeat clinical and preclinical trials —something that takes time and is costly. More importantly, says Ms Timmermans, "the repetition of clinical trials raises serious ethical questions, since it would imply withholding medicines that are already known to be effective from some patients (the control group), solely for commercial purposes...."
From the paper itself:
[M]ore countries should resist demands that monopolize the use of clinical trial data and blur the boundaries between the intellectual property regime and regulatory requirements for pharmaceuticals. And the health sector should pay more attention to these developments outside its immediate purview, wake up to the far-reaching implications of these developments, and voice its concerns more widely and more effectively. Failing that, the battle for access to medicines will be lost on these new and little-known fronts.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/14/2007 10:20:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
