DeLauro: Leaked trade deal sides with Big Pharma

As the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) heads to final negotiations in Maui this month, the Obama administration is touting the deal as the most progressive of its kind in history. But a leaked chapter of the draft raises concern that the deal’s biggest champion is Big Pharma.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro

Rep. Rosa DeLauro

In a conference call with medical research leaders Friday, Rep. Rosa DeLauro said that strengthened patent-protection measures in the TPP mean profit for large pharmaceutical companies. But the protections “confirm the worst fears of health care advocates” by restricting access to cheaper, generic prescription drugs in the dozen countries affected, she said.

“We understand that drug companies need to pay for their research and development […] but generics are essential to millions of people’s access to life-saving medicine,” DeLauro said. “Instead of keeping them out of the market longer, we should be expanding the access.”

Though the text of the deal has not been made public, a leaked intellectual property chapter obtained by Politico this month reveals measures that would guarantee 12 years of patent exclusivity for drug companies, extend the scope of products they can patent and restrict access to research data across borders.

These measures could affect companies like Germany’s Boehringer Ingelheim, a global pharmaceutical company that houses its U.S. headquarters in Ridgefield, Conn.

DeLauro said these policies raise the danger of evergreening, a strategy where pharmaceutical companies extend patents indefinitely over profitable blockbuster drugs at the expense of smaller, generic drug makers — and ultimately, the public.

The draft also includes controversial provisions for “patent linkage,” which ties the market approval of generic drugs to the patent status of the original product, lengthening the process of getting cheaper drugs on pharmacy shelves.

“What is clear is that it is U.S. negotiators who are pushing to tilt the balance between intellectual property rights and public health even more toward the brand-name drug companies,” said Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill, in the conference.

Brian Honermann, the senior research advisor for amfAR, a center for AIDS research, said in the conference call that the new rules would cut off access to generic medicines for diseases like HIV/AIDS, cancer, tuberculosis and hepatitis C.

“We have achieved the target of having 15 million people on treatment [for HIV/AIDS] by 2015 […] but that goal would never have been able to be achieved if we did not have generic access to drugs,” Honermann said. “If the intellectual property standards that are being proposed in the Trans-Pacific Partnership were the intellectual property standard in 2002, in 2003, it would have prohibited countries like India, countries like Thailand, from having developed their generic drugs.”

The biggest worry, advocates said, is that the deal’s arrangements will become the de facto international standard.

“The proposed TPP will affect millions of people living in the negotiating countries and could set an unfortunate precedent for future trade agreements,” said K.J. Hertz, the senior legislative representative for the AARP, which signed a letter to President Obama in December highlighting concerns about the TPP.

If approved, the Trans-Pacific Partnership would link the U.S. and 11 Pacific Rim nations including Vietnam, Japan, Chile, Peru, Malaysia and New Zealand in a trade deal encompassing 40 percent of the world’s GDP.

Tatiana Cirisano