Gilead Lifescience

CASE WRITE UP – GILEAD ARV ACCESS PROGRAM

Gilead Science is a research based biopharmaceutical company dedicated to advancing therapeutics for treatment of life threatening diseases. It started in 1987 in Foster City California. Its main area of focus is antiretroviral(ARV) and have 11 marketed products. In 2001 Gilead got approval of Viread (tenofovir disoproxil fumarate) from US Food and Drug Administration for its commercial launch.

Viread was a significant improvement over exciting drugs because of it was first NTRI based on nucleotide analogue and 3 drug cocktail concept. Therefore it was immediate success and achieved sales of $226 million in US. Majorly because of viread Gilead reported its first operating profit of $ 72097.

Gilead after acknowlegding suffering caused due to HIV epidemic in developing countries, planned to expand the HIV treatment access beyond US and Europe in early 2003. Gilead desire to make ARV drugs accessible in the developing world led to establishment of Global ARV Access Program in April 2003.

Objective

GLOBAL ARV ACCESS PROGRAM

: make available company’s new drug to developing world at affordable price that would yield no profit to the company.

* It initially included 68 least developed countries in 2003 and later increased to 97.

* Principle of Global Access ARV Program are:

* But unfortunately there are several issues in the path of introduction of ARV drug in international market. The most important broadly categorize are Pricing and Distribution. Due to these issues viread was unavailable in developing countries for more than 3 years after company announced the plan.

The key concern here is whether the Gilead should provide its ARV’s to poor AIDS victim in Africa for free?

In my opinion providing free drugs to AIDS victim is not a feasible option for the company which just started reporting operation profit with launch of Viread in 2002. Moreover Board of directors of the public company...