‘Radical’ bill seeks to reduce cost of AIDS drugs by awarding prizes instead of patents
Prizes, not patents.
That could be the slogan for a radical idea that leading economists say would lower the price of new drugs for treating HIV/AIDS.
Treating AIDS costs tens of thousands of dollars per patient annually in the United States, and more and more patients are unable to afford the life-saving drugs, according to figures from the AIDS Drug Assistance Program. The waiting list for the program, which is jointly funded by federal and state governments and provides medicines to low-income patients, now stands at 2,759, up from 361 in 2010.
Academics have been saying for more than a decade that one way to lower drug costs would be to offer pharmaceutical companies a share of a multi-billion-dollar prize pool, instead of the current system of patents that give a company exclusive rights to newly developed drugs.
The notion surfaced in Congress last week at a hearing called by Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.), who has introduced a bill to establish a prize system for the development of anti-AIDS drugs.
"It simply blew me away - and would blow anyone's mind away - that one drug, Atripla, costs $25,000 per year" in the United States, Sanders said at the hearing of the subcommittee on primary health and aging.
Generic versions of the same drug cost $200 in Africa and other parts of the developing world.
