Intellectual Property and Public Health: copying of HIV/Aids drugs by Brazilian public and private pharmaceutical laboratories

Abstract

Brazilian public and private laboratories’ experience in copying ARVs since 1993 has been a technological learning process that in some cases has produced innovations. Reproducing drugs and synthesizing their active principles involves the combination of information available in patent documents and the partial rediscovery of certain know-how through laboratory manipulations. Chemists have to reconstruct the numerous “cat leaps” in patent documents, and in so doing often improve on the published processes or formulae. Generics laboratories are also able to use this knowledge base to invent new formulae, combinations of existing molecules, or to discover new molecules. Since 2000 the five laboratories studied have filed about ten patents on ARVs. We pieced together this technological learning process by interviewing chemists at generics laboratories, using the methods of the sociology of science.