NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Thursday, February 28, 2013

GlaxoSmithKline’s HIV/AIDS drugs business is to share intellectual property rights on children’s medicine in a patent pool designed to make treatments more widely available in poor countries.

ViiV Healthcare, majority-owned by GSK, is the second research-based pharmaceutical business to sign up to the new Medicines Patent Pool, following a lead set in 2011 by Gilead Sciences.

Although more than half of people living with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS now get the drugs they need – thanks to a major roll-out of treatment in Africa – an estimated 6.8 million still go without, according to UNAIDS.