Innovation and Competitive Capacity in Bangladesh’s Pharmaceutical Sector
Padmashree Gehl Sampath
#2007-031
The global pharmaceutical sector is highly patent intensive, and firms
rely on product, process and formulation patents to protect their
innovations. Intellectual property rights on pharmaceutical products, as
contained in the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual
Property Rights (hereafter, the TRIPS Agreement) have been defended on
grounds of extensive R&D investments required to discover and develop
new drugs. But at the same time, grant of uniform pharmaceutical patents
in all developing and least developed countries that are members of the
World Trade Organization in accordance with the TRIPS Agreement, raises
a range of issues for access to medicines. These issues can be framed
under three broad areas: the restriction of reverse engineering
possibilities for firms in developing countries and its implications for
catch-up in this sector, higher prices of drugs and access to medicines
as well as access to technologies due to patents on upstream
technologies. The transitional arrangements under the TRIPS Agreement
specifically mandated that all developing countries that are members to
the WTO enact national laws that are TRIPS-compliant by 2005. As a
result, from 2005 onwards, several countries like India, which played an
important role as producers and exporters of generic copies of brand
name products patented outside the country, can no longer produce such
drugs due to the introduction of TRIPS-compliant patent regimes in their
countries. Least developed countries have an extension until 2016 to
implement the pharmaceutical patent provisions of the TRIPS Agreement
under the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health. However, such
legal flexibility is quite meaningless for least developed countries in
the absence of local technological capabilities to produce generic drugs
amongst least developed countries.
Bangladesh, although a least developed country, is an exception in this
regard with thriving domestic processing sectors that are actively
engaged in producing textiles and ready made garments (RMGs), processed
food products and generic drugs. Therefore, the question that looms
large in the global access to medicines debate is whether Bangladesh's
pharmaceutical sector can gradually evolve to provide low-cost
substitutes of important patented drugs to other developing and least
developed countries? This study is an original empirical investigation
into issues of innovative capacity and competitiveness of the local
pharmaceutical sector in Bangladesh.
UNU-MERIT Working Papers
ISSN 1871-9872
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