Hard sell: Drug firms shower cloned freebies

Buy 1, get 4 free tadalafil copies as patents kick in.

You can buy one strip of tadalafil, the drug for treating erectile dysfunction in men, and get four strips free. Place a bulk order for 25 strips and get seven strips free with each strip.

Several pharmaceutical companies are offering such schemes to exhaust their stock of knockoffs of Elli Lily's tadalafil (called Cialis) which is understood to have been patented after 1995.

Drugs patented after 1995 will be considered patented drugs in India and the copycat versions of these drugs cannot be sold here. Nor can they be exported. This is one outcome of the product patents regime that came into force on January 1.

Pfizer has not, however, introduced its patented drug in the same therapeutic area, Viagra, in India.

JS Shinde, general secretary, All India Organisation of Chemists and Druggists, the apex body of over 500,000 chemists and drug wholesalers, confirmed Indian pharmaceutical companies were offering wholesalers two free boxes with every box of Tadalafil. Each box has 10 strips, and each strip contains 10 tablets. The schemes, however, vary from company to company.

Firms that market the chemical equivalents of the drug here include Ranbaxy Laboratories, Ajanta Pharma, Zydus Cadilla, Kopran, Glenmark Pharmaceuticals, Natco Pharmaceuticals, Matrix Laboratories and Shreya Life Sciences, and 30 other companies.

The Rs 300 crore erectile dysfunction drug market has been growing at the rate of over 41 per cent a year. While Tadalasia is Ajanta Pharma's brand, Ranbaxy markets it under the brand name Forzest. Kopran's version is called Nialis.

Executives at pharmaceutical companies, however, decline to comment on the reason for the scheme. A senior executive at a leading drug manufacturing company said, "It is also because of the intense competition that such schemes are being offered. The notification for the withdrawal of the tadalafil molecule is yet to be issued."

Industry sources also said that till such time a notice was issued, it remained a profitable business and companies will continue to push volumes.

In fact, Ajanta Pharmaceuticals had filed a case, claiming its generic version of tadalafil, which was being sold in the domestic market, was a pre-1995 product.