An employee of the Egyptian pharmaceutical company Eva Pharma has a package containing vials of Remdesivir, a broad-spectrum antiviral drug approved as a specific treatment for COVID-19, at the company’s factory, which started producing the drug this week with a production capacity of up to 1.5 million doses per month.
Fadel Dawood | dpa | fake pictures
Mylan said Monday that he will release a generic version of Gilead Sciences’ antiviral patch Covid-19 in India at Rs 4,800 ($ 64.31), about 80% below the price of the drug for wealthy nations.
California-based Gilead has signed licensing agreements with several generic drug manufacturers in an effort to make remdesivir available in 127 developing countries.
Last month, two privately owned Indian drug makers, Cipla and Hetero Labs, also released generic versions of the treatment. Cipla will value his version, Cipremi, at less than 5,000 rupees, while Hetero has valued Covifor at 5,400 rupees.
Gilead, last week, set the price of remdesivir at $ 2,340 per patient for wealthy nations and agreed to ship almost all of its supply of the drug to the United States over the next three months.
Mylan’s price was for 100 mg vials, but it was not immediately clear how many of those vials would be necessary for a full treatment. Gilead said that for a five-day course of treatment, a patient would need six vials of remdesivir.
Remdesivir is in high demand after the intravenously administered drug helped shorten hospital recovery times in a clinical trial, but there have been questions about its supply.
Mylan said he would manufacture remdesivir in India at his injection facility and was working to expand patient access in the 127 low and middle income countries where Gilead Sciences is licensed to do so.
India’s Comptroller General of Drugs has approved the remdesivir version of Mylan, to be called Desrem, for the treatment of suspected or laboratory-confirmed serious incidents of Covid-19 in adults and children, the company said in a statement.
India is the third most affected nation in the world, with a number of coronavirus cases increasing to 697,413 on Monday.
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