Date: 2014-12-01
Type of information: Licensing agreement
Compound: lopinavir, ritonavir
Company: Abbvie (USA - IL) the Medicines Patent Pool (Switzerland)
Therapeutic area: Infectious diseases
Type agreement: licensing
Action mechanism:
Disease: AIDS
Details: * On December 1, 2014, the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) and AbbVie announced a licensing agreement for lopinavir and ritonavir, top World Health Organization-recommended medicines for children. The licence will enable other companies and organisations to re-formulate and manufacture specially designed lopinavir/ritonavir and ritonavir paediatric treatments for distribution in low- and middle-income countries where 99% of children with HIV in the developing world live. The MPP-AbbVie agreement supports the work of the Paediatric HIV Treatment Initiative (PHTI), a collaboration among UNITAID, MPP, the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi), and the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) to spur the development of more appropriate and affordable HIV medicines for children. The PHTI is currently working with a range of stakeholders to help develop treatment options for paediatrics in the form of fixed-dose combinations (FDCs), to share patents and technology and to encourage market uptake once new FDCs are developed. The AbbVie-MPP collaboration, which marks the first time AbbVie has granted a licence for generic production of its HIV drugs, extends MPP\'s portfolio to eleven ARVs and one medicine for an opportunistic infection. MPP holds licences for other paediatric medicines from patent holders Bristol-Myers Squibb, Gilead Sciences and ViiV Healthcare and is in negotiations with Merck&Co to license paediatric formulations of raltegravir. The LPV/r licence thus has broad implications as it enables the development of important FDCs with other MPP licensed medicines such as atazanavir/ritonavir (ATV/r) an alternative to LPV/r for children. The MPP-AbbVie agreement covers 102 countries of which more than 65 are classified as middle-income nations. Moreover, provisions in the agreement permit manufacture and distribution in countries where AbbVie does not hold patents, such as in India where the company has withdrawn its patent applications for both lopinavir and ritonavir.
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