Wockhardt Limited, a renowned Indian pharmaceutical and biotechnology company (logo image taken from here) that has its base in Mumbai, has recently earned quite a significant accolade from the Government of India for the large number of patents it has filed for and been granted in course of the past few years. It was on September 24, 2009 that the Union Government had made its decision known of awarding to the company the prestigious title of the ‘Pharmaceutical Company with the maximum number of Patent filings and grants from India’; the award was subsequently presented to the company at a function held in Hyderabad on September 25, 2009 by Mr Anand Sharma, Minister for Commerce & Industry.
According to press releases available here, Wockhardt has been granted till date 70 patents, 15 from the Indian Patent office and 55 from the American and European Patent offices. Mr. Habil Khorakiwala, who is the chairman of the company, was quite expectedly proud of it having achieved this much-coveted recognition and termed the award as “a recognition of Wockhardt’s robust, resilient and uncompromising intellectual pursuit in discovering new ways and methods of medical innovation.” He further added that the said award in effect recognises the efforts of over 500 scientists working in the Wockhardt Research and Development centres involved in the research of Biotechnology, New Drug Discovery, New Technology in Pharmaceutical and Medicinal chemistry.
Wockhardt has always been perceived in the industry as a technology-driven global pharmaceutical and biotechnology major with an innovative multi-disciplinary research and development programme. It has 5 research centres and 14 manufacturing plants spread through various countries and continents, which have always taken pride in their strict compliance to the international regulatory standards prescribed by the US FDA, MHRA and other global regulatory bodies. The dedicated Global IP team of Wockhardt has demonstrated a high calibre of R&D and intellectual prowess throughout the world, which in turn has allowed the company to have a global footprint including the
This news is certainly being welcomes by the company that has recently posted a net loss of Rs. 190 crore for the second quarter ended June 30, 2009, as compared to a net profit of Rs. 103.6 crore for the corresponding quarter of 2008, due to exceptional items like interest, exchange rate fluctuation and mark-to market (MTM) losses. If nothing else, it ought to work wonders for the reputation of the company and incentivize other pharmaceutical and biotechnology majors to concentrate on applying for patents and securing the same, which can certainly have significant implications for the industry in general.
I have a simple question: why is “pharmaceutical company with the maximum number of patent filings from India” a “prestigious title”? And, isn’t it rather strange that the Minister for Commerce and Industry is doing the praising rather than the Minister for Health and Family Welfare?
Frankly, this ‘report’ reads more like a Wockhardt press release than anything else. Actually, many of the sentences are verbatim copied from the linked press release.
Why would a currently loss-making company with a large patent portfolio incentivize other pharma and biotech firms to focus on patents rather than delivering good products and solutions?
This report is as bereft of critical analysis as Monty Python’s Norwegian Blue is bereft of life.
Since when has the number of patents [non usable/ non commercialised] been a key positive attribute for a company?
@Anonymous Coward: I agree that your comments are to a certain extent justified. First of all, this post wasn’t meant to be a critical analysis as such. One of the several aims of the SpicyIP team is to inform the readers about what is going on in the IP scenario, so that comments can be made on that, which in turn can pave the way for future analytical research and posts.
Now as to the question why the said title is a ‘prestigious’ one at all, the fact remains that Indian companies till date are much behind in patent filings compared to many others. Some say it indicates a lack of original R&D. Under such circumstances, the government may feel that acknowledging the work of one company may encourage others to up the ante, so to speak. And moreover, the award was also for most number of grant, not merely applications. I doubt that if a company had randomly filed a hundred patents, mostly frivolous ones, and thereby fail to secure even 10% of the same, then it would have been considered for this award. So, one can also perceive this as an incentive for diminishing the number of frivolous patent applications. About the linked press release, the facts and figures and quotes had been imported from the same and hence the acknowledgment too. And as for the Ministry and Commerce stepping in to give the award, the fact remains that patents feature most prominently within their domain too, although I agree that the absence of the Ministry of Health from the entire scenario is a bit strange; just as I mentioned before, this fact may require further research and I thank you for pointing out the same -without the readers helping us on our way and pointing out our mistakes, this blog has no hope of functioning as well as it does 🙂
@shouvik:
Implicit in your response is the idea that a) patents are good; b) that patents are hard evidence of abstract concepts such as “R&D”.
Firstly, patents and R&D are completely different things, and “patents” should not be used shorthand for innovation or R&D. There are entire fields such as the software industry which have burgeoned without patents (in most of the world); indeed many would argue the burgeoning is because of the lack of patents. Pharmaceutical products were not patentable in Italy till 1978, but still at that point in time Italy was the world’s fifth largest pharma producer. According to David Levine, 8% of all new pharmaceutical discoveries in 1978 were happening in Italy. After pharma patents were introduced by the Italian Supreme Court, Italy dropped off the world’s pharma radar, and the cost of drugs in Italy increased.
Secondly, pharma product patents raise the cost of drugs and treatment (since medical equipment can also be patented). That might possibly be the reason why it isn’t the Health Ministry that’s happy with all these patents. Would you have more details about the kinds of patents filed by Wockhardt? Formulations? Processes? Equipments?
I, for one, would not be overjoyed by increase in medical costs. The USD 1 billion per drug statistic often cited as a justification for monopolistic prices (supported by the patent system, of course) is bunkum, as it does not account for the fact that the bulk of research is not done by these companies; the various tax cuts they get, etc. An book (and an article in the NYRB) by Marcia Angell clearly demonstrates this. To quote a bit from that article:
In 2002, as the economic downturn continued, big pharma showed only a slight drop in profits—from 18.5 to 17.0 percent of sales. The most startling fact about 2002 is that the combined profits for the ten drug companies in the Fortune 500 ($35.9 billion) were more than the profits for all the other 490 businesses put together ($33.7 billion).[12] In 2003 profits of the Fortune 500 drug companies dropped to 14.3 percent of sales, still well above the median for all industries of 4.6 percent for that year. When I say this is a profitable industry, I mean really profitable. It is difficult to conceive of how awash in money big pharma is.
Drug industry expenditures for research and development, while large, were consistently far less than profits. For the top ten companies, they amounted to only 11 percent of sales in 1990, rising slightly to 14 percent in 2000.
The biggest single item in the budget is neither R&D nor even profits but something usually called “marketing and administration”—a name that varies slightly from company to company. In 1990, a staggering 36 percent of sales revenues went into this category, and that proportion remained about the same for over a decade.[13] Note that this is two and a half times the expenditures for R&D.
Perhaps it is time to rethink the granting of monopoly rights to pharma companies and instead find innovative ways to reduce drug costs (public funding of clinical trials, for instance, instead of granting patents). If only things like TRIPS, the pharma lobby and commenters on IP blogs who believe that NGOs working on health rights are bad didn’t exist. But we can all dream.
@shouvik
I believe a clarification is warranted. I would not have taken objection to the lack of critical analysis in this report were it not praising Wockhardt. Your report provides not only news (that the Ministry of Commerce, in its grand wisdom, provided Wockhardt this “award”), but also opinion (that this is a good thing).
Had you only providing news in this write-up, I wouldn’t have felt the need to make that comment about lack of analysis.
@ Anonymous Coward – I wish all of us on the blog had the time to carry out more analysis on the newsy items but you will appreciate the fact that we’re always running short on time and therefore will skip the analysis sometimes.
You as a commentator have every right to comment on the lack of ‘critical analysis’ and even fill in the blanks if necessary but I would rather you drop the snide analogies to Monty Python – the tone of your comments seeks to provoke confrontation rather than a discussion.
I’m sure if you were to deliver your critical analysis minus the snide analogies, a lot more of us would be willing to indulge in a discussion with you.
Prashant
I think Prashant is absolutely right here.
Shouvik wanted to put something up quickly and may have therefore decided to focus mainly on the newsy bit.
Please maintain some civility during the course of discussions on this blog…getting personal with your attacks will only harm the natural progress of healthy discussions on this blog.