90% of essential medicines off-patent, study reveals
Only 10% of essential medicines recommended by the World Health Organisation are on patent, according to a report by research and advocacy organisation, the Geneva Network.
The new analysis, released in November, studied the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines (ELM), released in June 2019, which provides an updated list about what essential medicines should be available worldwide every two years.
The study by the Geneva Network showed that 47 out of the 458 total items (10.3%) listed on the 21st edition EML are under patent somewhere in the world, an increase of less than 1% compared to 2017(9.4%).
Among the 150 lower-income countries surveyed, the study found approximately 6,500 total active filings. Overall, 120 (80%) of the lower-income countries had 50 or fewer total active patent filings for the 47 patented medicines, and approximately 2% of the EML patent filings in lower-income countries are set to expire in 2020. A fifth of lower-income countries surveyed do not have any active patents listed.
According to the report, approximately 20% of all active EML patents in lower-income countries are subject to a Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) licence, bilateral licence, and/or commitment to not enforce.
The seven countries with 200 or more active patent listings in order from greatest to least were China, Russia, Mexico, the Democratic Republic of Korea, Brazil, South Africa, and Turkey with 657, 418, 400, 356, 293, 239 and 223 total active patents, respectively.
While certain health concerns, such as cancer; multidrug-resistant conditions such as tuberculosis (MDRs); non-communicable diseases (NCDs), including heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes and chronic lung disease; and hepatitis, have consistently been addressed through new additions for the past three EML publications, no single-use has consistently topped the list, said the analysis.
However, cancer has remained within the top three uses addressed across the 19th, 20th, and 21st editions of the EML. For both the 21st and 19th editions, the majority of new additions were drugs used to treat cancers, while MDRs topped the list for the 20th edition EML.
Of the 38 new additions to the 21st edition of the EML, 13 (34.2%) are used for treating cancers, six (15.8%) are for treating NCDs affecting the heart, and five (13.2%) are for treating MDRs.
“While the number of patented medicines on the EML has increased in recent editions, the portion of the list currently under patent remains a small portion of all drugs on the EML, currently about 10%. A deeper dive into the data shows that many drugs are only patented in a fraction of lower-income countries,” said the study.
“Moreover, many of these patented drugs are subject to institutionalised programmes to provide access at lower cost,” it added.
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