www.nytimes.com/2000/12/01/science/01PIRA.html -> www.nytimes.com/2000/12/01/science/01PIRA.html?ex=1083643200&en=28a6fbc53c3cb9c1&ei=5070
Join a Discussion on Prescription Medication B OMBAY To anyone else, the room looks like the unprepossessing office of a college science teacher. But to the multinational pharmaceutical giants, it is the lair of a pirate king. Grinning proudly, he brandishes his trustiest weapon, the scribbled notebooks he has kept since his days as a chemistry student at Cambridge in the 1950's. Page upon page is filled with dainty hand-sketched lattices representing carbon rings: new molecules being tested in the West. They are the blueprints for plunder that the pirate has gleaned from his magazine subscriptions; And just downstairs in the conference room is his treasure hoard, glittering with the pinks and greens of tiny pills, the sheen of gelatin capsules, the sharp glint of injection ampuls. In the room's glass cabinets are the 400 drugs made by his company, Cipla Ltd. Amlopres, its knockoff of the hypertension drug Norvasc. Some of these compounds make $1 billion or more a year for the Western companies that hold the patents on them. They are sold by Cipla at one- twentieth to one-fiftieth of the price paid in the United States. And they are all perfectly legal, at least under Indian law. Hamied, Cipla's managing director and India's most outspoken buccaneer, said during a tour of his headquarters. Under Indian law, only manufacturing processes, not the products themselves, are covered by patents. So Indian drug companies can boldly reverse-engineer best-selling drugs and sell copies cheaply. Annual world sales of drugs amount to about $400 billion, and some executives claim that a tenth of that, $40 billion, is lost. But it is also true that Western drug companies would sell very little in the developing world at the prices they charge Americans and Europeans. A PhRMA study released in February found that losses in India were $69 million a year, but it covered just 20 common knockoff drugs. Bale said the total loss figure for India was probably $100 million a year.
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