55 Civil Society Groups Ask US Government To Allow Export Of Affordable Version Of Prostate Cancer Drug Xtandi

A range of 55 civil society organisations from around the world today sent a letter asking the United States Department of Health and Human Services to accept an offer from a Canadian generics company, Biolyse Pharma, to manufacture and export high-priced cancer drug Xtandi to countries with a per capita income of less than one-third that of the United States.

The groups included Knowledge Ecology International, Public Citizen, Oxfam, NAACP, cancer and HIV/AIDS groups and “a host of other social justice, faith, patient, and consumer groups,” as described by KEI in a release.

The letter and press statements are here: http://keionline.org/node/2645

According to KEI, Biolyse asked the US to enter into an agreement by exercising its royalty-free licence rights under the Bayh-Dole Act, which allows the government to use taxpayer-funded patented inventions “for or on behalf” of the United States.

The cancer drug enzalutamide, with the brand name Xtandi, was developed with US government funding.

“Xtandi is sold in the United States at a price of over $129,000 per year, by two drug companies: California-based Medivation, which has a licensing deal on the drug with UCLA, and Japan-based Astellas,” according to the letter.

“Pfizer announced in August that it would purchase Medivation for $14 billion, just months after UCLA sold its royalty rights for Xtandi for over $1 billion. Xtandi is already in the top 10 cancer drugs for worldwide revenue, and is expected to move up to the top 5 by 2021,” it said.

The letter said that whether the US government enters into agreement with Biolyse or other generics producers, the drug “will be far less expensive and far more widely accessible.”

“Often neglected in the US drug pricing debate is the power the government has to protect the public from excessive prices for drugs that were developed with federal research funding,” KEI Director James Love said in a statement. “While some might accept that the United States will tolerate excessively high domestic prices on a federally funded invention, it is an entirely different matter to ignore the consequences of high prices in countries where incomes are far lower.”