Abuse of BT patent rights?
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Patent owners stall fast HIV test
Long wait for results cuts effectiveness in fighting disease
By Geeta Anand
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
msnbc.com
...The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and U.S. Army officials say an easy-to-use, rapid HIV test is vital to reducing the U.S. rate of HIV transmission — which remains stubbornly high at 40,000 new cases a year and is rising sharply in low-income, minority populations. According to CDC estimates, each year one-third of the 2.1 million people tested for HIV at public clinics don’t come back for their results. Many go on unwittingly to infect others. At the public clinic Norris visited, 200 of the 500 people tested during the past two years didn’t pick up their results, the clinic says. Many of these people are poor and transient, making it hard for the clinic to track them down.
But simple, fast HIV tests, which are commonly used in dozens of other countries, aren’t available in the U.S. The reason: a patent granted over a decade ago on a rare form of the virus. The company that controls the patent, the big diagnostic-products maker Bio-Rad Laboratories Inc., has been approached by several small companies seeking licensing rights to sell their fast HIV tests here. Bio-Rad refused. Bio-Rad did sell some licensing rights to three big companies, but those companies don’t sell easy-to-use tests in the U.S.
Critics at the CDC and the military say Bio-Rad and its three big U.S. licensees — Abbott Laboratories Inc., Chiron Corp. and Johnson & Johnson — have little incentive to sell a rapid test domestically because they already dominate the $200 million U.S. market for the slower, lab-based HIV tests. Abbott, in particular, is the biggest U.S. seller of the slower tests. Quick tests would require the companies to conduct expensive clinical trials, and would likely siphon off sales of slower tests, the critics say.
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