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Glaxo Will Further Cut Prices of AIDS Drugs to Poor Nations
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April 28, 2003
By Reed Abelsom
NY Times
GlaxoSmithKline, the world's largest maker of AIDS drugs,
plans to announce today that it is further cutting the
prices of these drugs by as much as half in poor countries.
The price of Combivir, the company's popular AIDS therapy
that combines two drugs in a single pill, has been cut to
90 cents a day, from $1.70, a reduction of 47 percent, the
company said. With the reduction, the medicine is available
at a price roughly equivalent to some generic versions of
AIDS drugs, it said. The price of Combivir in the United
States is about $18 a day.
GlaxoSmithKline also said it was reducing the price of its
other drugs to treat AIDS and H.I.V. - the virus that
causes AIDS - including AZT, which would be available for
75 cents a day. The prices are available to qualified
customers in 63 countries, including all of sub-Saharan
Africa.
In cutting these prices, GlaxoSmithKline's chief executive,
Jean-Pierre Garnier, said the company was making good on a
two-year-old commitment to provide AIDS drugs at no profit
to impoverished countries.
"These price cuts demonstrate our commitment to making
vital medicines more affordable through sustainable
preferential pricing," Dr. Garnier said in a statement.
Last year, GlaxoSmithKline supplied nearly six million
tablets of Combivir to developing countries, the company
said, up from about 2 million tablets in 2001.
The company said it was able to reduce the drugs' prices
because it is making the drugs less expensively, the result
of improvements in its manufacturing techniques and deals
it has struck with some of the suppliers of the raw
materials that go into the medicines. Last September, the
company reduced prices to poor countries by as much as a
third.
Drug companies have come under intense pressure to lower
the cost of these drugs so patients in poor countries can
get them, and GlaxoSmithKline has come under particular
criticism because of its size in the market.
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