A meeting of Community Advisory Board in Eastern Europe and Central Asia was held in Kiev last week. This time treatment access activists from 9 countries of the region have met with representatives of the Medicines Patent Pool and Gilead Sciences.
Meeting with the Patent Pool
At the meeting with the Patent Poole practical aspects of working with the main sources of information about patents (Patent Pool database, the Eurasian Patent Organization database etc.) were highlighted. Also an overview of the recent agreements of Patent Pool has been done including information about their impact on the region, as well as information about how to read the license agreement.
Following the meeting, participants urged Patent Pool first of all to take into account the high burden of the HIV epidemic in the region in the next agreements with pharmaceutical companies and ensure that all EECA countries are included, to work on improving the existing agreements and to consider expanding its activities to other diseases, in particular hepatitis C and B.
Meeting with company Gilead
This is the second meeting of the EECA CAB with the company this year and the first meeting with the representatives of headquarters of the company.
“We tried to organize this meeting for a long four years, — said one of the participants, — and we are very happy that finally the headquarters of the company are interested in our region”.
Among the important issues that were raised during the meeting were issues of pricing policy of the company, current situation on the registration status of Truvada, Viread (tenofovir) and Atripla in EECA countries etc.
The activists urged Gilead to take immediate steps to register Atripla in Russia, Belarus and Azerbaijan, where Gilead is responsible for registration. The participants also expressed hope that when deciding on the new products pricing policy Gilead will take into account the specificity of the epidemic in the region, not only the economic component.
Minutes of meetings with more detailed information will soon be available at the EECA CAB website.
15.10.2013