More than 80% of pharmaceutical, pharmachemical, and biotechnological patent applications recorded between 1995–2006 were in just six countries (US, Japan, Germany, France, UK and Switzerland) - You don't base your investment in R&D on one country's market, you base it on the whole global market - In the EU or America or Japan … the law is not going to change. They are safe in these countries, that's where their profits come from, and that profit is protected. If they didn't have protection in those six countries, that's when they would have a point to make. The inability to find new blockbusters has nothing to do with the sales of a couple of drugs in the Indian market.
Patents are designed to reward a person’s or a company’s invention by preventing others from copying and selling a product. That gives the patent holder a monopoly on supply. And pharmaceutical companies work hard to gain and extend such protections.
India’s law sets a higher bar for protection than in some other countries, limiting the ability of companies to get patents for new versions of drugs whose active ingredients were previously known unless they can show significant therapeutic benefit. U.S. and European patent laws more readily grant patents to updated versions regardless of whether they offer major improvements in efficacy over the original compounds.
A frequent complaint was that the US Pharma Industry in 1990's was that the country’s patent office granted monopoly protection too easily for innovations that didn’t represent major advances over existing medicines or known science, a practice known as “evergreening.”
Longer-acting versions of old medicines were given patents, allowing their manufacturers to market them as better than the older versions, whose patents had expired—and whose prices were cheap. The collective effect of a low bar for patents drives up healthcare costs and insurance premiums for patients which is not acceptable in India.
When you weigh the need to stimulate innovation by rewarding it against the imperative of making life-saving inventions accessible to people, India’s approach surely makes sense.
New products aren’t developed in a vacuum, after all. They rely on generations of discoveries to which a whole population - indeed a whole world, is the legitimate heir.
85% of the World's HIV/AIDS Antiretroviral Drugs Made in India