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India protects
remedies from foreign patents
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In the first step by a
developing country to stop
multinational companies
patenting traditional
remedies from local plants
and animals, the Indian
government has effectively
licensed 200,000 local
treatments as “public
property” free for anyone to
use but no one to sell as a
“brand”.
The move comes after
scientists in Delhi noticed
an alarming trend — the
“bio-prospecting” of natural
remedies by companies
abroad. After trawling
through the records of the
global trademark offices,
officials found 5,000
patents had been issued — at
a cost of at least $150m —
for “medical plants and
traditional systems.”
“More than 2,000 of these
belong to the Indian systems
of medicine ... We began to
ask why multinational
companies were spending
millions of dollars to
patent treatments that so
many lobbies in Europe deny
work at all,” said Dr. Vinod
Kumar Gupta, who heads the
Traditional Knowledge
Digital Library, which lists
in encyclopaedic detail the
200,000 treatments. The
database, which took 200
researchers eight years to
compile by meticulously
translating ancient Indian
texts, will now be used by
the European Patent Office
to check against
“bio-prospectors.”
Mr. Gupta points out that in
Brussels alone there had
been 285 patents for
medicinal plants whose uses
had long been known in the
three principal Indian
systems: Ayurveda, India’s
traditional medical
treatment; Unani, a system
believed to have come to
India via ancient Greece;
and Siddha, one of India’s
oldest health therapies,
from the south.
In the past India has had to
go to court to get patents
revoked. Officials say that
to lift patents from
medicines created from
turmeric and neem, an Indian
tree, it spent more than
$5m. In the case of the
neem patent, the legal
battle took almost 10 years.
We won because we proved
these were part of
traditional Indian
knowledge. There was no
innovation and therefore no
patent should be granted,”
said Mr. Gupta.
India is also unusual in
that it has seven national
medical systems — of which
modern medicine is but one.
Almost four-fifths of
India’s billion people use
traditional medicine and
there are 430,000 Ayurvedic
medical practitioners
registered by the government
in the country. The
department overseeing the
traditional medical
industry, known as Ayush,
has a budget of 10 billion
rupees .
India’s battle to protect
its traditional treatments
is rooted in the belief that
the developing world’s rich
biodiversity is a potential
treasure trove of starting
material for new drugs and
crops. Mr. Gupta said that
it costs the west $15b and
15 years to produce a
“blockbuster drug.” A patent
lasts for 20 years, so a
pharmaceutical company has
just five years to recover
its costs — which makes
conventional treatments
expensive.
“If you can take a natural
remedy and isolate the
active ingredient then you
just need drug trials and
the marketing. traditional
medicine could herald a new
age of cheap drugs.” — ©
Guardian Newspapers Limited,
2009.
The Hindu (February 2009)
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