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Ranbaxy AIDS drug first to get Brazil nod

Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd has become the first pharmaceutical company to get approval to sell in Brazil a biologically equivalent generic form of a GlaxoSmithKline AIDS drug, a spokesman told Reuters on Friday.

Ranbaxy is India's top drug-maker by sales, and along with Bombay-based Cipla Ltd is an exporter of low-cost generic AIDS drugs.

Cipla shocked global drug majors in February by offering an AIDS triple drug cocktail for less than a dollar a day to international charities.

"We expect to launch our generic form of lamivudine in Brazil by September, in time to bid for a government tender for the AIDS drug which we value at $20 million," Paresh Chaudhry said by phone from Ranbaxy headquarters in Delhi.

Chaudhry said the Brazilian ministry of health expected generic forms of lamivudine to be priced 40 per cent below the GlaxoSmithKline rate, and wanted to distribute 22 million dosages of the drug to AIDS patients in Brazil.

"Our drug is the first generic version of lamivudine that complies with a new Brazilian rule stipulating all generic forms should be biologically equivalent to the original drug," Ranbaxy regional director Vinod Dhawan told Reuters.

He said GlaxoSmithKline did not have patent protection for the drug in Brazil.

"If we win the tender we will start supplies early in 2002, and also plan to sell in the open market, though that is much smaller," Dhawan said.

Dhawan said he did not know how many other bidders there would be for the tender.

Approval has been received by a Ranbaxy subsidiary, Ranbaxy S P Medicamentos, a joint venture in Brazil with locals partners. Ranbaxy owns 55 per cent of the operation.

Indian law allows only for the patenting of processes by which drugs are made, not the drugs themselves. That allows companies to copy drugs under patent in the West by using a process that differs from the original.

This approach means Indian drug maker spend little on research, reducing the costs significantly. Also, their manpower and production costs are very low, allowing them to supply drugs more cheaply.

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