The access to medicines crisis
Patents can have a dramatic impact on access to medicines when they are used to prevent competition.  A drug company that holds patents on a medicine has the right to prevent others from manufacturing it and therefore can charge an artificially high price.  When a company is selling CD-ROMs or toy dolls for example, this might be of no great significance.  But when life-saving treatments for diseases such as HIV/AIDS or cancer become unaffordable to those that need them, the consequences can be - and are - devastating.  In developing countries, where people pay for drugs out of their own pockets and very seldom have health insurance, the high price of medicines becomes a question of life and death.

The most effective answer: generic competition
The most effective and sustainable way to bring down the price of a drug is through competition between different manufacturers.  But if a medicine is under patent and the patent owner is not willing to allow competition, the impact on a drug’s price is striking.

The drugs to treat HIV/AIDS provide a perfect illustration of how patents allow manufacturers to keep the price of medicines high, and how competition brings those prices down.  When MSF began providing antiretroviral treatment to people living with HIV/AIDS in 2000, a year’s treatment course cost more than US$ 10,000 per person. At this time, antiretrovirals (ARVs) were only available from the drug companies that held the patents. With the onset of competition among multiple producers, prices began to plummet in the years that followed.  The most-used triple-drug AIDS treatment in the developing world now costs less than US$ 100 per year.

This 99% price reduction over the course of six years was possible because the medicines were not under patent in several countries with pharmaceutical production capacity – such as Brazil, India and Thailand – allowing local producers in these countries to legally manufacture generic versions of the medicines patented in developed countries, thereby driving prices down. These affordable generics could also be exported to other developing countries where the medicine was not under patent.