India Grants Pfizer Patent On Pneumonia Vaccine, Stokes Fear Of Unaffordability 22/08/2017 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 views expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and are not associated with Intellectual Property Watch. IP-Watch expressly disclaims and refuses any responsibility or liability for the content, style or form of any posts made to this forum, which remain solely the responsibility of their authors. MUMBAI (Reuters) – India has granted Pfizer Inc a patent for its powerful pneumonia vaccine Prevenar 13, in a blow to some health groups that said this would put the treatment out of reach of thousands in poorer nations. The decision by India’s patent office bars other companies from making cheaper copies of the vaccine and allows Pfizer to exclusively sell it in India until 2026. It’s a big victory for the US drugmaker in a market that has the world’s largest number of pneumonia cases, a lung disease that kills nearly a million children a year globally. Tuesday’s decision also has international implications, as several poorer nations rely on India’s robust drugs industry to supply cheaper copies of medicines and vaccines. For the complete Reuters story, see here. For an indepth analysis of this issue by IP-Watch, see (IPW, IP and Health, 12 April 2017). 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 "India Grants Pfizer Patent On Pneumonia Vaccine, Stokes Fear Of Unaffordability" by Intellectual Property Watch is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.