The Government Pharmaceutical Organization (GPO) said on Wednesday it will import the blood-thinning drug Clopidogrel, which is locally sold as Plavix, at three cents each from Emcure Pharmaceuticals. Emcure won the recent bidding to supply Clopidogrel by offering the lowest price for the drug.
Plavix, which is marketed by Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi-Aventis, sells for $2 each in local drugstores. GPO chairman Wichai Chokevivatana said buying the generic drug from India will save the government $4 million.
GPO is an independent unit of Thailand's ministry of public health and is tasked to produce medicines to reduce imported drugs and for national emergency. It ordered the first two million pills of Clopidogrel, which will be delivered within two months.
Thailand imports 20.5 million of Plavix pills every year but only 20 percent of heart disease patients in the country can afford it.
There was no available reaction from Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi-Aventis.
It was not the first time that Thailand had licensed a company to mass produce a drug whose patent belongs to another pharmaceutical firm. In January, the health ministry also licensed India to produce generic versions of the expensive AIDS drugs Efavirenz and Kaletra due to budget constraint.
The move elicited protests from the drugs' patent owners Abbott Laboratories and MSD. The two companies complained that their intellectual property rights were violated, but local health officials justified the move saying it is in accord with World Trade Organization rules, which allow the licensing in cases of national emergency.
