By
Donald Zuhn –-

Last
month, the international humanitarian aid organization Médecins Sans Frontières
(MSF) — known to many as Doctors Without Borders — announced
that it was asking nine of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies to pool
their HIV patents in order to accelerate the availability of new treatments to HIV/AIDS
patients.  As part of the effort to
encourage these companies to pool their patents, MSF has launched an e-mail
writing campaign calling on Abbott Laboratories, Boehringer Ingelheim,
Bristol-Myers Squibb, Johnson & Johnson, Gilead Sciences, GlaxoSmithKline,
Merck & Co, Pfizer, and Sequoia Pharmaceuticals to place specific HIV drug
patents in the pool.  The specific patents
relate to drugs that MSF has identified to be essential based on the group's
field experience, and which have been recommended by the World Health
Organization (WHO) for use in developing countries.  Michelle Childs, the Director of Policy & Advocacy for MSF's
Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines, said that while the creation of an
HIV patent pool was "a simple idea," in which the companies would "share their
knowledge in return for fair royalty payments," such a pool would have "the
potential to transform companies' approaches to access to HIV medicines and
foster innovation in a way that marks an alternative to the confrontation and
litigation of the past."

The
MSF release noted that the international drug purchasing agency UNITAID was
currently establishing a medicines patent pool for HIV drugs, but said the
success of this effort depended on the willingness of patent owners to
participate by including their patent rights in the pool.  Ms. Childs stated that the UNITAID
project presented "an opportunity for these drug companies to demonstrate
that they are genuinely committed to effective measures that allow access to life-saving
medicines for people with HIV in developing countries," adding that
"[s]ome companies have expressed interest in the idea, but we need them to
go further and put key patents in the pool."  Dr. Eric Goemaere, medical coordinator for MSF in South Africa,
noted that the formation of the patent pool "comes at a crucial
time," because many HIV/AIDS patients in MSF's South African programs have
developed resistance to current medicines and "need to switch to newer
more effective drugs now." 
Without new medicines, Dr. Goemaere said such patients "face a
return to AIDS death row as treatment options dry up."

The
group contends that the formation of an HIV patent pool would "speed up
the availability of more affordable versions of new medicines, as generic
production could begin well before the 20-year patent terms expire."  In its release, MSF suggests that
patent barriers prevent innovations such as new pediatric formulations or
fixed-dose combinations.

In
a Daily News & Analysis report regarding the HIV patent pool,
an unnamed MSF official noted that because the pool "will lead to
companies losing monopoly . . . some of them don't seem keen on such a
proposition."  However, the
official said that Gilead Sciences had shown some interest.  In the same report, a GSK spokesperson
stated that the company had created a patent pool for neglected tropical
diseases earlier this year "because we felt it could help draw attention
to the need for more research," but contended that "HIV is not
included in our patent pool because as far as R&D is concerned, we do not
consider it as neglected."  In
August, Patent Docs reported on GSK's
patent pool, which was formed to aid in the discovery and development of new
medicines for the treatment of sixteen neglected tropical diseases, and which,
at the time, comprised more than 2,300 patents (see "Alnylam to Donate RNAi Patents to Patent Pool").