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Essential cancer medicines
Cancer drugs for Africa… from Africa?
More than two years ago, Cipla Quality Chemical Industries, a pharmaceutical manufacturing company in Kampala, Uganda, announced that it would start producing cancer drugs. In a deal agreed in 2021 with the Ministry of Health, the company, which is part…
The cancer patients still struggling to access drugs in the wake of anti-corruption reforms
Miriam Espinoza, a food vendor from Michoacán, Mexico, still remembers the day she received her cancer diagnosis in 2019. After months of waiting for a CT scan and several visits to gynaecologists, who told her that the lump in her…
Call-to-arms for Europe to provide essential paediatric anti-cancer medicines
A European Society for Paediatric Oncology (SIOPE) project has defined 66 anticancer medicines considered essential for treatment of children with cancer. The study, published in The Lancet Oncology, 23 December 2022, represents the first pan-European effort to systematically analyse the…
First voluntary licensing of cancer drug sets ‘vital precedent’ for the industry
The first voluntary licence for a patented cancer medicine was signed last month on the fringes of the 2022 World Cancer Congress in Geneva. The agreement between the pharmaceutical company Novartis and the Medicines Patent Pool – a UN backed…