Mandetta: country should never ever break medicines patents

Portal EBC
By Pedro Peduzzi (Agência Brasil)
Photos: José Cruz (Agência Brasil)

The minister of Health, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, said today (4) that the country should never ever break medicines patents, because it hinders the ability of inventions and the time spent by the private sector with research and researchers. Mentioning the document issued by the Geneva Assembly, Mandetta defended more transparency in the calculation of prices charged for medicines.

The statement was made during the opening of the Seminar Interfarma – Technological Innovation in Health and the Value for the Patient, in Brasília. When addressing representatives of the health care sector, the minister said that the private sector is the manufacturing party, and the government should take on the role of encouraging manufacturing initiatives. 

“The Ministry of Health has high expectations about the sector. The 21st century will be wonderful to witness. Each one of you may be about to announce a new step; another advancement. After we cracked the genome and made the jigsaw puzzle available to science and the pharmaceutical industry, we knew beforehand that we would have a century of innovations in the genetics field”, he said.

With this scenario in mind, Mandetta defended the creation of the Brazilian Institute of Genetics, the increased number of geneticists and studies on the matter in the country. “We cannot remain in this level of technological dependency as dangerously high”, he added.

Therefore, he said that breaking patents of medicines can hinder the sector’s investments. “There is no good in threatening to break patents. We have to protect the ability of invention and the time spent by our researchers. I know each one of you spend today several hundreds of thousands of dollars to build your compliance systems [in order to be compliant with the law and regulations], and that this word is now mandatory within the companies.”

Mandetta highlighted that the final document signed by many of the countries participating of the World Health Assembly in Geneva asks for more transparency in the pricing of medicines. According to him, this will be necessary “for us to be able to face the start of this revolution in an appropriate and balanced fashion”.