Public health and pharmaceutical patent: challenges of the Brazilian policy for access to medicines

• Grant number: 12/01407-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: May 01, 2012
• End date: December 31, 2012
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Law - Public Law
• Principal Investigator: Juliana Presotto Pereira Netto
• Grantee: Larissa Soldate Correia
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências Humanas e Sociais (FCHS). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Franca. Franca , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research project aims to study the compulsory licensing of medicines in Brazil from the perspective of the Law of Social Security and public health. In order to achieve its main objectives, the Social Security we will widely studied; thereafter, the social right to health will be analyzed, not only related to the absence of disease, but also to the existence of human beings with dignity, from which can be deducted, among other means, the individual right of access to medicines, theme object of this study. Some of these drugs, however, are billed exacerbated because of the patents that fall upon on them; thus, access to certain medications is not often achieved by low-income people, which, therefore, become completely dependent on state protection. Regarding the health as a social right, it is the duty of the state to offer it to the people, but it also faces the same difficulties of the individuals: the high cost of certain drugs. For all these reasons, the Brazilian government has been working on the implementation of some of the patent medicines, what raises profound questions and different opinions, which basically confront two constitutionally protected rights: the access to health and the right to property, the latter based at the economic interest related to the cost of pharmaceutical research. So, all these issues will be analyzed, in particular from the experience with the compulsory licensing of drugs that act on the control of AIDS, whose patent in Brazil has been abolished in 2007, and the urgency of discussing the current problems of medicine to fight serious chronic diseases. (AU)