Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2002. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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San Francisco Examiner - October 18, 2002
Roger Bate, M.D., Special to The Examiner
He will be even more upset when he learns of the latest data to come out concerning AIDS research: There are between 5 percent and 30 percent fewer anti-AIDS drugs in development than there were a few years ago.
PharmaProjects, an independent consultancy employed by the pharmaceutical industry, found the overall trend in drug development is slightly upwards, roughly 5 percent more anti-infectives in development than in 1998.
But the overall increase was lower than expected and hides an interesting, but worrying, trend in one sector of the market which pulled down the average.
Companies producing anti-AIDS drugs were developing fewer products than in the late 1990s. The reduction was almost a third lower in 2001 than in 1998. Why are fewer drugs being developed?
Dr. Des Martin, president of the South African HIV Clinicians Society, has his suspicions. "The threat of generic competition and attacks on multinational companies could be behind the recent decline in HIV anti-retroviral compounds" he says.
The latter point is one that the pharmaceutical industry apparently does not want discussed widely. One industry executive, who did not wish to be identified, agreed: "We have lost the battle with the activists, and now the market is less profitable. The result is that we are spending less research and development time on anti-retrovirals," he said.
There may be one benign reason for having fewer products in development.
When new approaches to combating a disease are tried, there may be avenues of research begun which subsequently are shown to be fruitless. Those drugs that remain in development are of higher quality, and are more likely to succeed in clinical trials. This would mean the data could be slightly misleading and the picture is rosier than imagined.
But if this were the case, surely the industry would be spinning this line rather than ducking the question. It seems more likely that it's the lack of potential profitability that is driving industry away from research.
Perhaps governments should be strengthening patent protection on AIDS drugs?
Recently, the United Kingdom's Committee on Intellectual Property Rights published its first paper. Although a scholarly work, it is in favor of weakening patent protection of anti-AIDS drugs in developing countries. This report will send the wrong signals to an industry that is already moving away from AIDS drug development and into the more fruitful areas of erectile dysfunction, baldness and hypertension.
In the past three years, activist groups like Doctors Without Borders have been celebrating the numerous climbdowns from the industry. Companies have been giving AIDS drugs away, lowered their prices and licensed their drugs with generic manufacturers.
In boardrooms, decisions have obviously been made to steer research in other directions. It's ironic that activists have scared drug companies into action that will harm AIDS patients in the long run. For while government and activists blame capitalism, the drug giants and profiteering, it is the drug industry itself developing solutions, instead of just talking about them.
Dr. Roger Bate is a director of the South African nongovernmental organization called Africa Fighting Malaria.
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