State pharmaceutical company not the solution for cheaper medicines in SA

(Image: Dvortygirl, via Wikimedia Commons)

His comment follows a media briefing held earlier last week in Pretoria where the ANC indicated the party was seriously considering establishing a state-owned pharmaceutical company to meet the challenges facing the country, particularly the combating of HIV/Aids.

Anley says a state drug company does not guarantee cheaper medicines for consumers, and could in fact divert precious financial resources from where they would be more effective.

Burden on taxpayers

"The cost of setting up such an operation would see taxpayers coughing up anything in the region of R1bn to R2bn. It's also a highly complex undertaking and it will be years before the mooted operation would be able to provide medicines at a substantially reduced rate."

Anley says pharmaceutical companies are already heavily discounting medicines to the State.

"Most companies don't even factor in overheads. For example, in the most recent tender for anti-retrovirals, prices were more than halved. It is highly unlikely that a state-owned pharmaceutical company would be able to operate more efficiently than existing private sector operations," says Anley.

The sensible approach would be...

He says that the sensible approach to ensure immediate benefits would be to loosen the lengthy and costly registration process for critical drugs like HIV and TB, which is arguably the largest constraint in ensuring affordable medicine make it to the market.

For example, Pharma Dynamics, has for the past four years spent considerable resources in preparing to tender for the state TB medicines contract. However the registration of the products has been caught up in delays at the Medicine Control Council (MCC).

Anley puts this down to inefficiencies within the system. "We have liaised extensively with the MCC and the Department of Health over the tender, to no effect.

"The tender system needs to be changed so that registration with the MCC is not a prerequisite for qualification for tendering, but rather becomes a requirement of the successful tenderer, and that the winning tender receives a fast track process of registration. In this way competition would be dramatically increased resulting in lower prices to the State without having the necessity of establishing their own manufacturing facility," says Anley.

Pharma Dynamics

Pharma Dynamics, founded in 2001, claims to be the fastest growing pharmaceutical company in SA. It enjoys a leader position in the cardiovascular therapeutic arena and in most of the molecular classes in which it operates. It is also steadfastly consolidating its position in the over-the-counter market with both pharmaceutical and nutraceutical brands. Its manufacturing sites and processes are regulated and approved by the Medicines Control Council (MCC) in South Africa, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States of America, and the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Authority (MHRA) in the United Kingdom.