Health & Medicine - Posted by David Orenstein-Brown on Tuesday, July 10, 2012 10:35 - 0 Comments 
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Generics key to low-cost HIV relief efforts
"We are now providing HIV medications for more than 3 million people, hopefully 4 million soon, and are buying them for the least cost possible," says Charles Carpenter, professor of medicine at Brown University. (Credit: spirit of america / Shutterstock.com)
BROWN (US) — The use of generic HIV drugs in the developing world has slashed per-patient costs from $1,100 in 2005 to $300, allowing the US government to vastly expand care delivery, a new study reports.
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The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPfAR) began in 2003 with good intentions, but it was not until the US government’s massive overseas public health campaign adopted generic drugs that it became a success, according to an article in the July issue of the journal Health Affairs.
Nearly a decade later, expanding the availability of generics remains urgent, especially as doctors in the field encounter resistance to first-line treatment regimens.
“By 2002 generic drugs had been shown to work, so there was not a question of whether they were efficacious,” says Kartik Venkatesh, a graduate student at Brown University and the paper’s lead author. “So then it was a question of how do we expand access to treatment so that more than 5 to 10 percent of those in need of treatment were getting it. Now two out of three individuals who need treatment in the 15 PEPfAR countries are getting it.”
That’s because the program, which primarily bought proprietary medicines from major US manufacturers in the early years, eventually made the transition to much cheaper generics, says Venkatesh who will speak about the paper as part of a Health Affairs briefing on July 10 that features Nils Daulaire, director of global health affairs in the Department of Health and Human Services, and Eric Goosby, US global AIDS coordinator.
PEPfAR, launched by President George W. Bush and then reauthorized by President Obama, is a multibillion-dollar effort to deliver HIV treatment and other related health services to people in 15 developing nations, including 12 in sub-Saharan Africa.
Early on, the program did not have a mechanism in place to allow for the adoption of generics. Instead the program only purchased antiretrovirals that the FDA had approved for use in the United States. Whether that was because of concerns about drug quality or industry politics or a combination of both seemed a matter of debate.
“There was tremendous concern at the beginning that antiviral medications bought by PEPfAR would be limited to branded drugs, purchased from the US pharmaceutical industry,” says Charles Carpenter, professor of medicine at Brown.
The FDA subsequently agreed to evaluate and to give tentative approval, when appropriate, to qualifying foreign-made generic antivirals so that they could be bought by PEPfAR and used exclusively overseas. The program also expanded drug availability by developing a sophisticated supply chain management system to anticipate demand.
In addition, over time the FDA has lowered the costs it charges foreign drug companies to test their generics.
“We are now providing HIV medications for more than 3 million people, hopefully 4 million soon, and are buying them for the least cost possible,” Carpenter says.
Carpenter and Kenneth Mayer, a professor at Harvard Medical School and adjunct professor of epidemiology at Brown, are co-authors on the paper.
PEPfAR is now facing the challenge that many people have HIV infections that are resistant to the first-line and second-line antiretroviral drugs available as generics. PEPfAR has not yet approved and gained access to many of the drugs that make up a second and third line of antiviral defense in a generic form.
“I don’t know how long that’s going to take, but I do know that Ambassador Goosby is working very hard to achieve that end,” Carpenter says.
For other major global health efforts, Carpenter says, what PEPfAR’s experience has to teach will vary based on the disease at hand. But studying PEPFAR’s history with generics does have value for the future, even in new efforts that might target non-communicable diseases such as diabetes or obesity.
“One piece of this puzzle is having a regulatory framework in place early on to allow for efficient and transparent procurement of generic drugs,” says Venkatesh. “This requires the US government, the Food and Drug Administration, the World Health Organization, generic drug manufacturers in the developing world, as well as the multinational pharmaceutical companies to all be on the same page, at least at some level.”
Support for the research came from the Center for AIDS Research, an NIH-funded collaboration with Brown University, Lifespan, and Tufts University, and an NIH Ruth Kirschstein National Research Service Award.
More news from Brown University: http://news.brown.edu
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