Drugs company refuses to relax crucial patent

War on terrorism: Antibiotics

Canadian health authorities have given up their attempt to order cheap copies of the anthrax antibiotic Cipro, after a legal threat from the pharmaceutical firm that owns the patent.

The Canadian government had hoped to build a stockpile of antibiotics for any anthrax outbreaks by placing an order with a local drug company.

But Bayer, a German conglomerate, said yesterday it would fight to defend its Cipro patent despite of anger in North America, where demand for the expensive drug has soared since the start of the bioterrorism alert.

Trent Lott, the Republican leader in the United States Senate, said politicians were ready to debate stripping Bayer of the patent for Cipro, so that copycat drugs could go into production.

The move could halve the costs of building a national stockpile of about 1.5 billion anti-anthrax tablets, and would mean that supplies could be ready much earlier.

Bayer has switched its Cipro factories to a 24-hour production schedule but has not been able to keep pace with demand.

Bruce Downey, the head of Barr, a US drug-maker, said yesterday he could start shipping copycat Cipro within two or three weeks of a US Senate decision to revoke Bayer's patent. Barr is paid $30m (£21m) a year by Bayer in an agreement not to produce its version of Cipro.

Anger over those sorts of deals led the US Senate to approve a Bill last week forcing disclosure of "don't compete" agreements between big pharmaceuticals firms and smaller potential rivals.

The Canadian firm Apotex had been promised an $830,000 government order for its version of Cipro. But that was rescinded by Health Canada, the health ministry, yesterday after it brokered a deferred supply deal with Bayer.

Health Canada said it "recognises the validity of Bayer's Cipro patents and the fact that Bayer is the only Canadian manufacturer holding a notice of compliance that establishes the safety and efficacy of Cipro".

Bayer is understood to be considering contracting out the manufacture of Cipro to other companies in a bid to speed up production. The antibiotic has been prescribed more times in the US since the first anthrax cases were reported than at all during the previous year.

Earlier this week, the company said it welcomed efforts by the US government to promote the use of penicillin and other off-patent antibiotics as anthrax treatments, in an effort to take the pressure off the company's production staff.