Roche have a legal problem. Their lysis buffer is completely unpatentable, it's a standard reagent whose composition has been published many times over and is obvious to any biochemist. And once you disclose the makeup you can't claim trade secret either.<p>The sanest way for Roche would be to price accordingly, buying your own kit saves technician labour, but we can't have than, can we?
“ Pharmaceutical company Roche announced Friday afternoon that it will release the recipe for its lysis buffer if Dutch laboratories ask for it. ”<p>Is what the article says. What it doesn’t say is whether Roche will actually do so, or use stalling tactics. One shouldn’t count their chickens before they hatch.
It's great that finally EU is doing something. It's better late then never.<p>Companies are doing their best to be profitable, but it can mean trillions of dollars of damage to economies, and many people dying. Governments are meant to step up in these situations.
The Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health;<p>In Paragraphs 4 to 6 of the Doha Declaration, governments agreed that:<p>"4. The TRIPS Agreement does not and should not prevent Members from taking measures to protect public health. Accordingly, while reiterating our commitment to the TRIPS Agreement, we affirm that the Agreement can and should be interpreted and implemented in a manner supportive of WTO Members' right to protect public health and, in particular, to promote access to medicines for all.
In this connection, we reaffirm the right of WTO Members to use, to the full, the provisions in the TRIPS Agreement, which provide flexibility for this purpose.<p>5. Accordingly and in the light of paragraph 4 above, while maintaining our commitments in the TRIPS Agreement, we recognize that these flexibilities include:<p>(a) In applying the customary rules of interpretation of public international law, each provision of the TRIPS Agreement shall be read in the light of the object and purpose of the Agreement as expressed, in particular, in its objectives and principles.<p>(b) Each Member has the right to grant compulsory licenses and the freedom to determine the grounds upon which such licenses are granted.<p>(c) Each Member has the right to determine what constitutes a national emergency or other circumstances of extreme urgency, it being understood that public health crises, including those relating to HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other epidemics, can represent a national emergency or other circumstances of extreme urgency.
(d)
The effect of the provisions in the TRIPS Agreement that are relevant to the exhaustion of intellectual property rights is to leave each Member free to establish its own regime for such exhaustion without challenge, subject to the MFN and national treatment provisions of Articles 3 and
4.
6. We recognize that WTO Members with insufficient or no manufacturing capacities in the pharmaceutical sector could face difficulties in making effective use of compulsory licensing under the TRIPS Agreement. We instruct the Council for TRIPS to find an expeditious solution to this problem and to report to the General Council before the end of 2002."
These provisions in the Declaration ensure that governments may issue compulsory licenses on patents for medicines, or take other steps to protect public health.<p>/!\ All countries of weight signed this already, but not enough countries for the treaty to be in effect and the deadline is in sight. /!\<p>Pressure this information & save lifes.
I might be misunderstanding the situation, but it feels like Roche has been acting like a printer manufacturer: capture the market with underpriced devices, but having those devices only work with a specific variation of an otherwise not that special input material that only they can produce, and then charging a premium for that.
Swedish healthcare workers have discovered that chlamydia tests they have in stock are also effective at detecting corona. News (in Swedish) <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22706874" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22706874</a>
Don't the reagents for similar commercial lab rtPCR tests typically have to be kept hard frozen too?<p>CMIIAW: this doesn't seem like a readily DIY biohacking-possible project without some significant infrastructure, procedural knowledge, and expenses.<p>Also is there a low-volume, open source rtPCR procedure with cheaper equipment and consumables?
Also this news that reagent is no longer required:<p><a href="https://www.ssi.dk/aktuelt/nyheder/2020/03-ssi-loeser-stort-mangelproblem-ved-test-for-covid19-27032020" rel="nofollow">https://www.ssi.dk/aktuelt/nyheder/2020/03-ssi-loeser-stort-...</a>
This is reminiscent of what happened in 2008, when Roche was the only manufacturer of Tamiflu (Oseltamivir)[1] and the Indian drug company Cipla managed to get legal approval to release a generic clone of it called Antiflu in India. And the rest of the world followed soon enough.<p>Governments can and do lift up patent protections in times of emergencies.<p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oseltamivir" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oseltamivir</a>