Rabat – Swiss-American pharmaceutical firm Novartis signed a voluntary licensing agreement this week with the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) to boost access to leukemia treatment in seven middle-income countries including Morocco.
The agreement signed on the sidelines of the World Cancer Congress provides some pharmaceutical companies in select countries with the right to develop, manufacture, and supply Nilotinib, an oral medication that treats chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) in adults and children aged one and above.
The drug, developed by Novartis, joined the World Health Organization Model List for Essential Medicine (WHO EML) in 2017 as a second-line treatment for leukemia patients resistant to oral chemotherapy medication Imatinib.
Leukemia is a blood cancer that results from an abnormal increase in the number of white blood cells and disruption of the bone marrow’s ability to produce red blood cells and platelets.
Some pharmaceutical firms in Egypt, Guatemala, Indonesia, Morocco, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Tunisia can now benefit from Novartis’ licensing agreement to produce Nilotinib once the patents are in force after local regulatory authorization.
The agreement between Novartis and the Unitaid-backed international organization MPP marks the “first ever public health-oriented voluntary license agreement on a cancer medicine,” MPP’s press statement reads.
By increasing local production of leukemia treatment in Morocco and the other six countries, the two parties seek to support the global health initiative to treat cancer amid unequal access to treatment.
However, “making a medicine available is only one part of the challenge to increase access to cancer treatments,” says Novartis’s President of Global Health and Sustainability Lutz Hegemann, adding that the medicine needs to “reach those who need it, wherever they live.”
For this, MPP Executive Director Charles Gore argued that the “voluntary license in the non-communicable disease space sets a vital precedent … although the remaining patent life is relatively short.”
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With the hope of starting a “paradigm shift” in the pharmaceutical sector, Secretary of the WHO Expert Committee on the Selection and Use of Essential Medicines Benedikt Huttner said that the recent licensing might encourage more pharmaceutical companies to make “essential patented cancer medicines [accessible] to help ensure that patients globally can benefit.”
According to the Swedish Institute for Health Economics (IHE), Morocco has the highest cancer mortality rate compared to Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates.
With new cancer cases in Morocco expected to increase from 144 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2018 to 192 in 2030, with 226 predicted in 2040, the need to make cancer treatment more accessible and affordable to all is prevailing.
While lung cancer was the most common among Moroccan men in 2018, leukemia male patients only represented 3% of the total cases. As for women, leukemia was among the least common cancer types representing just 2% of the cases. Meanwhile, breast cancer had the highest share at 37%.
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