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Bill Gates moves to cut cost of HIV-AIDS drugs and treatment to $75 a year for African carriers
With this deal, the incidence of death associated with HIV/AIDs will be reduced drastically.
According to the deal, the Bill Foundation will guarantee least sales volume while the drug makers - Mylan Laboratories and Aurobindo Pharma, would supply the pills for $75 a patient per annum.
With this, millions of these pills would now be churned out to Africa and help in curtailing the spread and treatment of the epidemic in Africa.
The new drug has a fixed-dose combination of tenofovir disoproxil fumarate, lamivudine and dolutegravir (TLD). Dolutegravir will help fight drug resistance associated with older treatments and drugs.
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The deal agreement was signed at the United Nations Headquarters in New York on Thursday, September 21, 2017.
“We need to make that guarantee because (of) the fixed costs of everybody gearing up to make high volume,” Gates told Reuters in a telephone interview. “That just wasn’t going to happen unless we put forward a very substantial volume guarantee,” says Gates.
The agreement between the parties is aimed at making HIV/AIDS treatments/drugs affordable to carriers in about 92 poor countries including all African countries. Clinical trials on the new drugs have shown that the dolutegravir works faster and have fewer side effects.
More so, the pill has demonstrated a greater potency against drug resistance than standard HIV drugs used in Africa and other poor countries.
Across the globe, antiretroviral therapy and drugs are a billion of dollars in the market.
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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a global health partnership platform which includes the governments of South Africa and Kenya, the Clinton Health Access Initiative and U.N. agencies.
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