Publication

Using the Supreme Court of India's rejection of Novartis’s appeal for patenting and exclusive marketing of the cancer drug Glivec as a backdrop, this paper discusses India's intellectual property rights law and its implications for pharmaceutical innovations and generic drug manufacturing. It argues that despite the common belief that patent regulations favor generic drugs production and thus enable access to cheaper drugs by the domestic poor, in practice domestic price ceilings on essential drugs have encouraged generic manufacturers to increasingly focus on export markets.