Medicines Patent Pool: First Licence Agreement For Hepatitis C Drug 23/11/2015 by Intellectual Property Watch Leave a Comment Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)The Medicines Patent Pool announced today that it signed a first licence for a hepatitis C drug with Bristol-Myers Squibb. The agreement allows manufacturing of daclatasvir, royalty-free in 112 low-and middle-income countries. According to an MPP press release, which specifies that 76 of those countries are classified as middle-income nations by the World Bank, “Nearly two-thirds of all patients living with hepatitis C in the LMICs [low and middle-income countries] reside in the territory covered by this agreement.” Daclatasvir was added to the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines earlier this year. The MPP, whose mandate previously covered HIV and AIDS treatments announced earlier this month that it was expanding its coverage to hepatitis C and tuberculosis treatment (IPW, Brief, 9 November 2015). The agreement allows for the manufacture of generic daclatasvir to be based anywhere in the world as long as it is for sale in the 112 countries covered by the agreement, the release said. The agreement also gives the possibility for generic manufacturers “to develop fixed-dose combinations with other direct-acting antivirals….” According to the release, “Bristol-Myers Squibb will provide a technology transfer package and information needed for the manufacture and registration of the product.” The MPP, which has been criticised in the past for leaving some emerging economies out of the royalty-free licence agreements it concluded with pharmaceutical companies, said in the release that “nearly two-thirds of all patients living with hepatitis C in the LMICs reside in the territory covered by this agreement.” The full licensing agreement is available here. Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window) Related "Medicines Patent Pool: First Licence Agreement For Hepatitis C Drug" by Intellectual Property Watch is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.