A division bench of the Delhi high court on Tuesday upheld an earlier ruling that allowed India’s generic drug maker Cipla Ltd to manufacture and market a copy of patented lung cancer drug Tarceva in the domestic market.
Vindicated? Yusuf Hamied, chairman and managing director of Cipla.
It also insisted that only one cheaper generic version of the patented drug will be permitted in the local market.
But it should not be treated as a legal precedent until the appeal is settled. The court said so after hearing an appeal filed by Swiss drug maker F. Hoffman-La Roche Ltd against the earlier ruling. The court also ruled that Cipla should not export this cancer drug from India to other markets where Roche has a patent.
It directed Roche to submit a list of countries where it has got patent registration for the drug. The decision of the two-judge bench, which heard the Roche appeal, will help Cipla make a strong pitch in the local market as well as in some of the export markets including Nepal, Bangladesh and some of the African nations where Roche has not yet secured a patent.
Cipla offers this drug at one-third the price Roche sells in India.
Roche had on 12 April appealed against a March decision of a single-judge bench of the Delhi high court, which refused its plea for an injunction to restrain Cipla from infringing Tarceva patent in India.
Girish Telang, managing director of the Roche Scientific Co. (India) Ltd, the wholly owned Indian subsidiary of Roche, told ‘Mint’ that he had “faith in the Indian judiciary and today’s judgment had confirmed it.”
In his reaction, Cipla’s joint managing director M.K. Hamied said, “We are happy that the court has addressed our concern for the cancer patients of India, who will be now able to get this important drug at a cheaper price.”
Cipla had, in February, launched Erlocip despite Roche’s patent for the molecule in India that was granted in 2007. The case will come up for hearing on 12 May.
-C.H. Unnikrishnan
Bhuma Shrivastava contributed to this story.
Ahluwalia against commodity tax
New Delhi: Deputy chairman of Planning Commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia disagrees with the imposition of the commodity transaction tax (CTT) imposed on the trade of commodity futures in the Budget. “Transaction taxes have not worked in any part of the world, although finance ministry may have its own logic of imposing CTT. I, personally feel, a surcharge on brokers’ income could have been an effective tool to tap revenues and avoid speculation (if any) in the commodities market,” Ahluwalia said on the sidelines of a conference on “Taxation of Transactions” organized by the Invest India Economic Foundation and National Institute of Public Finance and Policy on Tuesday. The introduction of CTT was denounced by academics and industry leaders alike who branded it as a “retrograde step”.