Gilead Made $3 Billion Off Truvada in 2018 and It's Raising the Price

[PupCamo]

https://www.out.com/health/2019/3/27/gilead-made-3-billion-truvada-2018-and-its-raising-price?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=health

Many people know Truvada as the sky blue, 500mg tablet that people take daily to prevent HIV. But it’s something else all together: a cash cow for Gilead, the drug company that distributes the pill.

According to a new report in the Washington Post, Gilead Sciences earned $3 billion in sales from Truvada in 2018.

That’s an awful lot of profit, but here’s the catch: Gilead didn’t actually put up the money to prove Truvada could prevent HIV infection. You did. The research that went into making the drug, the Post reports, was done by Thomas Folks at a federally-funded U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lab. Using $50 million in federal grants, Folks proved that Truvada could prevent HIV infection in people who were exposed to HIV.

The U.S. government owns the patent for Truvada as pre-exposure prophylaxis. The patent was filed in 2007 and approved in 2015. Truvada itself has been used as a drug to fight HIV since 2004 and was approved by the Food and Drug Administration as PrEP in 2012. Despite owning the patent, the U.S. government gets no share of the profits, which it could use to find ways to get PrEP to the people who paid for its development.

[still_one]

1. The generic version of this was approved in 2017 by the FDA. A good question would be why isn't a

generic version of this available in the U.S.