Sensitize international regulatory authorities to lengthen drug patent times, to cover research costs and times. Giving a patrimonial value and tax incentives to the regulatory dossiers of the manufacturing companies. Develop rules that globally regulate the marketing of counterfeit medicines, preventing their imports. These are the themes of the IX International Pharma Licensing Symposium, scheduled from today to Friday in Rome with the participation of 300 delegates of drug manufacturing companies from all over the world. When a patent on a medicine expires and generic manufacturing companies are authorized to produce their low-cost version, "the originator company – recalled Marco Mochi, director of Sigma Tau's Corporate Licensing Business Development department during a meeting with journalists – loses at least 200 million dollars for the first year out of commercial protection.Furthermore, today the patent protection times of a scientific discovery are increasingly shorter for a number of reasons ranging from the request for ever more in-depth dossiers by international agencies, up to the need to provide for an increasingly extensive and detailed patent coverage umbrella", to prevent competing companies from being able, with a minimal modification of use, to circumvent patent protection and access the economic and commercial exploitation of the discovery. Such short times often do not allow companies to recover the billionaire investments necessary to pass from the intuition of the researchers to the commercialization of the product. Added to all this are the problems linked to the expansion of the pharmaceutical market to include the so-called emerging countries: a great social conquest, but at the same time a source of problems linked to abuse, counterfeiting and lack of legal protection of all kinds. It is therefore necessary to study interventions and act at an international level to push these countries to adapt to the laws generally applied in the West.
Pharmacist33 – 28 October 2009 – Year 5, Number 184
