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Dasatinib by the kilogram

I discovered during my googling that some people are buying dasatinib via the Chinese site, Alibaba. Sellers there are providing dasatinib in powder form looking like icing sugar. Surely, this is a patent infringement. I wonder when dasatinib will go generic in the United Kingdom.

Hi Nimbus,

Dasatinib is made by Bristol Myers Squib and I did read that its expiry in USA is set for October 2025 and the reasoning from the FDA was that having been introduced in 2006 the drug company needs 19 years of market exclusivity in order to recoup its initial investment.In Europe I saw a report that for CML use Dasatinib would expire on April 13 2020;UK for the time being is subject to EMA regulations so UK would follow these I guess.Some legal attempts to extend the patent in Europe failed I believe;drug companies will often update or change the formulation slightly in order to do this .In India Novartis had a huge battle over Glivec and lost  and the drug had two formulations alpha and beta;generics use the original or former formulation.

You might expect there to be a big reduction in price once a generic competitor is introduced but a pharmacist contact of mine says that the market takes a while to settle down according to how many competitor generics are brought in and the original producer will usually produce a generic like the example of Novartis offshoot Sandoz offering generic imatinib.My private hospital charges my insurers at least £5k for two months supply of Glivec and about £1k plus for Sandoz imatinib. NHS will do a deal with Teva and others and this would be confidential.

Regarding the dasatinib offered in China one should be aware of the high proportion of drugs in some parts of the world that are counterfeit often up to 50% of supplies in pharmacies ;on this forum a while back we had news of counterfeit Ponatinib and Glivec on offer on EBay UK (soon taken down)

Does anyone have any further information.?

Regards

John