It marks the first time the U.K. has explicitly written drug patent rules into a free trade agreement.
Sophie Inge, Caroline Hug
“The U.K. government is risking our healthcare system and the health of patients in order to reduce its ability to legislate and regulate in the interests of the public — and they’re doing that in order to please the pharmaceutical industry,” said Diarmaid McDonald, executive director at Just Treatment.
But speaking to POLITICO at an event to celebrate the deal on Monday, Trade Minister Chris Bryant rejected the suggestion that agreeing to the demands was a “trade-off” for the U.K., pointing out that Britain’s pharmaceutical industry had also lobbied for the changes.
“It was a concern on the Swiss side and a concern on our side,” he said. “But I’m very glad that we managed to come to an agreement on that.”
Asked about concerns within the Department of Health and Social Care, he added: “There’s always a bit of a negotiation between different departments and sometimes different departments are a bit more anxious than others about different elements. So sometimes you spend more time negotiating with your own government than you do with the people on the other side of the table.”
The commitments
Under the terms of the upgraded trade agreement, both sides will lock in the current level of intellectual property protection, including the Supplementary Protection Certificate (SPC) and Regulatory Data Protection (RDP).
While SPCs extend patent protection for pharma companies beyond the standard 20-year term to make up for time lost during the medicines approval process, RDP stops generic competitors from using pharma companies’ clinical trial data to gain regulatory approval to produce cheaper copies.
