However, Public Health Minister Mongkok na Songkhla said yesterday he was not personally going to negotiate with the patent owners of the combination anti-retroviral drugs and an anti-blood clotting drug. The taskforce in charge of compulsory licensing will meet with the drug companies tomorrow, he said.

It was expected that the drug companies would discuss the possibility that the ministry continues to buy their original products at an agreed price.

Last week, the ministry invoked a compulsory licence for the HIV/Aids drug Kaletra made by United-States-based Abbott Laboratories and the anti-clotting agent Plavix made by Sanofi-Aventis of France and Bristol-Myers Squibb of the US.

The ministry said the decision was justified under international trade rules because the high cost of the drugs constituted a crisis for the nation's health service.

Since then, the ministry has yet to proceed with compulsory licensing pending the companies' request to negotiate over the recently announced compulsory licensing, Mongkol said.

Concerning a suggestion by the drug companies involved to have the Intellectual Property Department mediate on the negotiations, Mongkol said the department was only authorised to mediate on royalty fees not the price of drugs.

The agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) states that under compulsory licensing the drug patent owner is eligible to receive a royalty fee in a range of up to five per cent of the market value of its product.

"Only in a case where they could not come to an agreement on by how much the drug companies should be compensated, then the department would step in," Mongkol said.

Arthit Khwankhom

The Nation