AIPLA 2016: Eli Lilly praises customs in fight against fakes
Customs is a useful tool that can be used to fight counterfeiters, according to Bruce Longbottom, assistant general counsel, trademarks at Eli Lilly.
The pharmaceutical company’s most heavily counterfeited product is Cialis (tadalafil), a treatment for erectile dysfunction.
Anti-psychotic medication Zyprexa (olanzapine) and Humatrope (somatropin [rDNA origin] for injection), an injectable human growth hormone, have also been counterfeited.
Longbottom was speaking in a personal capacity at the American Intellectual Property Law Association’s (AIPLA) 2016 Annual Meeting in Washington, DC on Friday, October 28.
Currently, most countries allow companies to record their rights with customs, which can be an importance piece in the anti-counterfeiting puzzle, Longbottom said.
Eli Lilly has 198 different trademarks and designs recorded with customs in 60 countries, while patents are recorded in 27 countries, primarily in Europe.
“When we first recorded these rights, especially with Cialis, we had a tiger by the tail. Once we did this, notices from customs around the world were coming in fast and furious. We were getting hundreds, if not thousands, of notices that counterfeit Cialis was being seized,”he said.
In terms of resources, Longbottom explained that Eli Lilly spends several million dollars a year on anti-counterfeiting with a team of around 25 people.
In the pharmaceutical industry, parallel imports have been a political hot button issue, according to Longbottom.
He added that “people don’t want to deny access to medicines by patents in developing countries. The products might come from developed countries and flow across borders into the developing countries”.
“We’ve found that we don’t want to go there. For the most part, we try not to make a case of that, and just let it go.”
Pharmaceuticals constitute a large portion of customs-detained goods, and Longbottom estimates that up to 10% of all drugs worldwide are fake.
Longbottom said: “When we first started developing Cialis, we realised that Viagra [produced by Pfizer] was possibly the most counterfeited drug and we were coming right into that competitive space.”
Eli Lilly realised it wasn’t just a legal issue but involved a number of different parts of the company, requiring a “multi-faceted”approach.
Longbottom added that the company quickly realised that, generally speaking, there were standard options that can be followed by customs officers, so it developed a set of handling instructions.
The pharmaceutical company has also recently created a manual for investigators and prosecutors to help them in building successful cases against counterfeiters of its drugs.
The AIPLA 2016 Annual Meeting finished on October 28.
