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IPR: Pharmaceuticals

Volume 14, Number 2 Article by Rupa Chanda September, 2002

IPR: Pharmaceuticals :

In the introductory panel of the Conference on IPR, the speakers included S Chandrasekaran, Deputy Controller of Patents & Designs, Govt of India; M D Nair, Consultant to the Pharmaceutical Industry, Chennai; P P Prabhu, former Commerce Secretary, Government of India; K Raghavendra Rao, MD, Orchid Chemicals & Pharmaceuticals and Jayashree Watal, Consultant to the WTO Secretariat.

S Chandrasekaran clarified what constitutes intellectual property, what a patent is, and how an invention may qualify for a patent.He pointed out that as a participant in the TRIPS Agreement, India is obliged to modify her statutes to make her IPR regime TRIPS compliant and this will impact domestic R&D, product patents and compulsory licensing. P P Prabhu brought out the three basic aspects of TRIPS that have been the subject of debate and criticism, namely, concerns about public health and access to medicines; harmonisation of approaches to the utilisation of living resources found in the TRIPS Agreement on the one hand and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity on the other; and transfer of technology. One of the factors leading to the November 2001 Doha Ministerial Conference of the WTO, was the widespread concern about patents leading to increased prices of medicines and reduced access to essential medicines, revealed Jayashree Watal, who was involved in the preparation of the Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health adopted in Doha. Watal dwelt on the two aspects most germane to the issue of public health — compulsory licensing and parallel trade.

With drug discovery being one of the most expensive and inefficient operations, M D Nair said that the hope for Indian drug discovery research lay in following a model different from the established Western model. He detailed the structure of the Indian pharmaceutical industry, its strengths and potential and projected a future scenario for the industry worldwide. Globally, K R Rao said, the industry was moving away from the earlier structure of vertical integration to one based on specific core competencies. India’s strengths could be converted into advantages in non-infringing processes for generic exports, analogue products with improved therapeutic characteristics, contract research and co-development, and new drug delivery systems. However, for this to happen the industry has to consolidate structurally, and the changes have to be engineered together by the industry, the government and the bureaucracy.

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