Gilead Pharma To Donate 200K Doses/Year of Truvada To HHS

FOSTER CITY, Calif.—Gilead Pharmaceuticals, the maker of the primary HIV-preventive drug Truvada, has signed an agreement with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to donate roughly 200,000 doses of the drug per year to be distributed by the agency. The agreement will last at least until the end of 2025, and may be extended until the end of 2030. Truvada is what is known as a "pre-exposure prophylactic" drug, or PrEP for short, and Gilead, which earns about $26 billion per year from its various HIV treatment and prevention drugs—$3 billion on Truvada alone—sells a month's supply (30 pills) of Truvada for between $1,600 and $2,000, depending on the recipient's insurance. In contrast, generic versions of the drug produced in India have been sold in Africa for $60 per year, and in fact, Gilead has developed a second-generation PrEP drug called Descovy, for which it is currently attempting to get approval, and if/when that happens, Gilead will substitute Descovy for Truvada under the government program. Though Descovy is expected to cost much less to produce than Truvada, and is more powerful, it will also sell on the open market for roughly $20,000 per year. President Trump, most recently in this year's State of the Union speech, promised to end the spread of HIV in the U.S. by 2030, and the administration's agreement with Gilead would go a long way toward fulfilling that goal. However, according to a New York Times report, "Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, who led a team at Massachusetts General Hospital who analyzed the costs of the Obama administration’s AIDS plan and has looked at the cost of the Trump plan, said the Gilead deal was 'a noble effort—but it covers less than 20 percent of the people who need it.'" Indeed; though many insurance plans cover Truvada, the out-of-pocket costs even with insurance makes the drug prohibitively expensive for many Americans. Moreover, according to CDC research, as reported on TheBody.com, "a majority of black and Latino MSM [men who have sex with men] surveyed in 2014 were willing to take PrEP to prevent HIV. However, 17% of the men surveyed were willing to take PrEP but could not pay for it, 48% were willing to pay between $1 and $50 per month, and 27% were willing to pay more than $50 per month"—figures that come nowhere near what Gilead charges for the drug. Moreover, according to The Times, the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating whether Gilead has stiffed the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention royalties for its work in developing the precursors of Truvada, and possibly even infringed the CDC's patents on its work. Pictured: A model of the HIV virus