Gilead sells breakthrough hepatitis C drugs for less overseas
Outsiders don’t want their daughters to marry any local boys, according to the village elders swapping stories in a tailor’s shop behind the Sikh temple, because most residents are infected with black jaundice.
Drugmakers have made the village of Lande Rode one of the theaters in a battle to grab market share for sofosbuvir, a miracle cure that Gilead Sciences Inc. sells in the U.S. as Sovaldi at a retail price of $1,000 a pill.
Gilead licensed 11 Indian companies to make generic versions, and they sealed marketing deals with others.
The companies sponsor screening drives, hand out free test kits to hospitals and offer bulk discounts to entire villages.
Like others in the industry, the company arranges to make life-saving cures available in some parts of the world for far less; laws and pressure introduced tiered pricing after expensive anti-HIV treatments became available in the ’90s and reduced deaths in rich countries and not poor ones.
In exchange for a 7 percent cut of sales, Gilead gave companies including Mylan NV, Cipla Ltd. and Natco Pharma Ltd. rights to make generics for distribution in 101 developing nations where hepatitis C is often untreated and $1,000 is more than people might earn in a year.
“The market has become highly competitive in the last six months with close to 20 companies launching their own,” said M.V. Ramana, executive vice president and head of branded markets at Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories Ltd.
Dr. Reddy’s, for example, set up a venture with lender Arogya Finance to offer no-interest loans for patients, and Abbott Laboratories worked with French medical equipment company Echosens SAS to supply Indian hospitals with 13 ultrasound machines that determine the level of fibrosis, or hardening, without a liver biopsy.
A main benefit of the competition, according to doctors, is that so many are being tested for hepatitis C, which can lead to cirrhosis and liver cancer.
Some of the highest infection rates are in Lande Rode and other villages of Punjab’s cotton-growing Malwa belt, where 30 to 50 percent of the population might have the virus, said Gagandeep Goyal, a gastroenterologist at Global Healthcare, a hospital sandwiched between an Adidas store and a Vodafone outlet in Bathinda, the fifth-largest city in Punjab.
The disease is a topic of conversation for the elders at the tailor’s shop in Lande Rode, a cluster of concrete houses dotting dirt roads and surrounded by rice and wheat fields.