US drug company Pfizer has penned a deal to allow its experimental Covid-19 treatment pill to be made and sold in 95 developing nations.
The deal with the UN-backed Medicines Patent Pool not-for-profit could make the treatment available to 53% of the world’s population.
But it excludes several countries that have had large Covid-19 outbreaks, including Brazil.
Pfizer says the pill lessens the risk of severe disease in vulnerable adults.
Pharmaceutical firms Pfizer and Flynn Pharma have been accused by the UK’s competition watchdog of charging “excessive and unfair” prices for an anti-epilepsy drug.
Phenytoin sodium capsules, used by 50,000 people in Britain, are made by Pfizer and sold by Flynn.
Pfizer said it was co-operating with the Competition and Markets Authority.
When Pfizer made the drug under its Epanutin brand name, the NHS spent about £2.3m on the drug, the CMA said.
This amount soared to £50m in 2013.
The CMA said Pfizer sold UK distribution rights to Flynn in 2012, but continued to make and supply the drug to the company.
The Supreme Court of Canada is invalidating Pfizer’s patent on the popular erectile-dysfunction drug Viagra for failing to openly disclose the drug’s active ingredient, as required by Canadian intellectual property law.
The 7-0 decision Thursday to open Viagra to competition ahead of its 2014 patent expiration underscores a major difference in how the Canadian and United States courts are interpreting patent laws.
Both nations have so-called “patent bargains” that require the disclosure of a drug’s chemical compounds in enough detail so that scientists can replicate it and learn from the invention, thus benefiting society. In exchange, the inventor, in this case Pfizer, gets the exclusive rights to market the invention for a limited period.
But “sufficiency of disclosure lies at the very heart of the patent system,” the Canadian high court ruled Thursday, and “adequate disclosure in the specification is a precondition for the granting of a patent.”
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