The argument that pharmaceutical companies’ bottom line can be gravely eroded by developing countries’ failure to uphold intellectual property rights of their drugs and medicines is usually exaggerated. A recent study shows pharmaceutical companies, in the first place, rarely seek patents in developing countries.

The study, published in the Journal of Health Affairs, examined trends for patent applications by pharmaceutical companies for the World Health Organization (WHO)’s Model List of Essential Medicines (WHO- EML). It found that “the typical developing country is likely to have fewer essential medicines under patent or pending application…”

The study, Amir Attaran of the UK-based Royal Institute of International Affairs, observes that pharmaceutical companies usually did not seek patents in developing countries, even when they legally had the option.

Out of sixty five countries studied, fifty seven had solid patent laws and pharmaceutical companies had a chance to apply for patents for seventeen patentable essential medicines, but they didn’t.

“Patents cannot cause essential medicines to be inaccessible in “many” developing countries because they do not exist 98.6 percent of the time; similarly, patents cannot be a “global” necessity of pharmaceutical business because companies forgo them 69 percent of the time.”

The study identifies market size as the major reason for pharmaceutical companies’ reluctance to apply for patents.

“An inventor’s incentive to patent (for medicines or otherwise) is greatest where there are more consumers having more disposable income,” the study explains. Countries with larger populations, and where per capita national income is high, the study argues, are likely places where pharmaceutical companies will apply for patents. Taking into consideration this finding, the study, then, challenges the validity of the argument by activist organization of the existence of a correlation between pharmaceutical patents and lack of access to essential medicines.

“…patents for essential medicines are uncommon in poor countries and cannot readily explain why access to those medicines is often lacking, suggesting that poverty, not patents, imposes the greater limitation on access,” notes the study.

On the issue of generic drugs, the study argues patents very infrequently block access to generic versions of essential medicines. The study finds that in sixty five countries where the study was conducted, patents and patent applications exist for essential medicines only 1.4 percent of the time.

Attaran, the study’s author, notes that even this “…overstates the frequency with which patents totally block access to generics, because it’s only a subset of patents that are absolutely fundamental and that generic manufacturers can never circumvent a patent on the active pharmaceutical ingredient, and for medicines containing two such ingredients, a patent on their co-formulation.” Actually, Attaran says, there were not patent barriers to accessing generic essential medicines in 98.6 percent of the cases studied.  The study concludes by recommending a further examination of the consequences of economic policies to access to essential medicines in developing countries.