A liver cancer treatment is off-limits to the NHS due to its unjustifiably high price, but in India, the same treatment is available for less than £100 a month.
In "Scrubbing Up" of this week Michelle Childs, from Médecins Sans Frontières, asks questions about why rich countries aren't doing more to reduce the cost of medicine.
Sorafenib tosylate is a liver cancer drug patented by the German pharmaceutical company Bayer and marketed as Nexavar.
Bayer's price for the drug is nearly £3,500 a month. (3,500 pounds = 4,150 euros change 31/3/2013)
Until March last year, India – a country where half of the population lives on less than £1 a day – had no choice but to pay this sum for the patent of Nexavar.
But to ensure its citizens had access to affordable prices, the country released a compulsory licensing clause that cuts the cost of the drug by allowing another company to produce the drug, even if it's still under patent.
This has reduced the price of the drug by a staggering 97% – generic versions of sorafenib in India now cost around £84 a month.
In the UK, where an affordable generic version isn't available, the price is around £3,000 a month, prompting drug regulators to say it's 'just too expensive' to justify making it available on the Service National Health.
In fact, NICE (the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) has rejected the use of Nexavar for the NHS on a cost-benefit basis.
Reactions in the UK to this decision were swift and
