Tahir Amin: Ongoing Work in Challenging Drug Patents

Transcript:

What are some of the cases you’re working on now?

So one of the major cases we’re working on is Sofosbuvir, branded as Sovaldi. It’s a hepatitis C drug, and currently we filed 10 IPRs last year in the United States [Patent Trial and Appeal Board, PTAB]. Currently, we’re waiting to hear whether those will be instituted, and by instituted, I mean whether the PTAB will take those cases on and will go into trial.

We have a number of cases going on in India involving hepatitis C drugs, and in China we already had some successful decisions.

The importance of these cases is to show that a lot of people are still not getting these new, direct-acting anti-viral hepatitis C drugs, and we feel that our work is to try and create an opportunity for people lacking access to get them.

Also, in the United States, a lot of people living with hepatitis C are not getting the treatment that they need, and I hope the cases we have brought will leverage some opportunities to try and get these drugs at more affordable prices, because only 1% of the number of Americans that need the drug are getting it at the moment.