India moves to protect traditional medicines from foreign patents
India fights to protect ancient treatments from western pharmaceutical
companies
* Randeep Ramesh
* guardian.co.uk, Sunday 22 February 2009 16.04 GMT
[Yoga could become 'public property' to prevent it becoming a brand.
Photograph: Sonny Tumbelaka/AFP/Getty Images]
In the first step by a developing country to stop multinational
companies patenting traditional remedies from local plants and
animals, the Indian government has effectively licensed 200,000 local
treatments as "public property" free for anyone to use but no one to
sell as a "brand".
The move comes after scientists in Delhi noticed an alarming trend â"
the "bio-prospecting" of natural remedies by companies abroad. After
trawling through the records of the global trademark offices,
officials found 5,000 patents had been issued â" at a cost of at least
$150m (£104m) â" for "medical plants and traditional systems".
"More than 2,000 of these belong to the Indian systems of medicine â¦
We began to ask why multinational companies were spending millions of
dollars to patent treatments that so many lobbies in Europe deny work
at all," said Dr Vinod Kumar Gupta, who heads the Traditional
Knowledge Digital Library, which lists in encyclopaedic detail the
200,000 treatments.
The database, which took 200 researchers eight years to compile by
meticulously translating ancient Indian texts, will now be used by the
European Patent Office to check against "bio-prospectors".
Gupta points out that in Brussels alone there had been 285 patents for
medicinal plants whose uses had long been known in the three principal
Indian systems: ayurveda, India's traditional medical treatment;
unani, a system believed to have come to India via ancient Greece; and
siddha, one of India's oldest health therapies, from the south.
Researchers found that in Europe one company had patented an Indian
creeping plant known as Brahmi â" Bacopa monnieri â" for a memory
enhancer. Another patent was awarded for aloe vera for its use as a
mouth ulcer treatment.
"We have shown the authorities that ayurveda, unani and siddha
medicinal uses were known in India. We would like the patents
therefore lifted," said Gupta.
In the past India has had to go to court to get patents revoked.
Officials say that to lift patents from medicines created from
turmeric and neem, an Indian tree, it spent more than $5m. In the case
of the neem patent, the legal battle took almost 10 years.
"We won because we proved these were part of traditional Indian
knowledge. There was no innovation and therefore no patent should be
granted," said Gupta.
Yoga, too, is considered a traditional medicine and one that is
already a billion-dollar industry in the US. Gupta said the Indian
government had already asked the US to register yoga as a "well-known"
mark and raised concerns over the 130 yoga-related patents issued.
"We want no one to appropriate the yoga brand for themselves. There
are 1,500 asanas [yogic poses] and exercises given in our ancient
texts. We are transcribing these so they too cannot be appropriated by
anyone.
"We have had instances where people have patented a yoga technique by
describing a certain temperature. This is simply wrong."
India is also unusual in that it has seven national medical systems â"
of which modern medicine is but one. Almost four-fifths of India's
billion people use traditional medicine and there are 430,000
ayurvedic medical practitioners registered by the government in the
country. The department overseeing the traditional medical industry,
known as Ayush, has a budget of 10bn rupees ($260m).
India's battle to protect its traditional treatments is rooted in the
belief that the developing world's rich biodiversity is a potential
treasure trove of starting material for new drugs and crops. Gupta
said that it costs the west $15bn and 15 years to produce a
"blockbuster drug". A Âpatent lasts for 20 years, so a pharmaceutical
company has just five years to recover its costs â" which makes
conventional treatments expensive.
"If you can take a natural remedy and isolate the active ingredient
then you just need drug trials and the marketing. Traditional medicine
could herald a new age of cheap drugs."
Medicines ancient and modern
Ginger: Patented to treat obesity. However, officials have found that
in a Siddha preparation, extracts of ginger root are used in a
treatment for obesity
Citrus peel extract: Patented to treat skin disorders and injuries.
Recorded in Ayurvedic texts as a key ingredient to treat skin diseases
Phyllanthus amarus (Himalayan stem herb): Patented "for the inhibition
of the replication of a nucleosidic inhibitor resistant retrovirus
and/or a non-nucleosidic inhibitor-resistant retrovirus, wherein said
retrovirus is an HIV." Indian traditional texts show the drug is used
for immuno-suppressive emaciating diseases
Brassica rapa (mustard): Patented to normalise bowel function or for
the prevention of colonic cancer. Unani has for years prescribed it
for stomach ailments
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/22/india-protect-traditional-medicines
