Gilead’s Truvada patent issues aren’t over

Gilead Sciences has faced months of backlash over the HIV-prevention pill Truvada and the government’s purported role in discovering it. That all seemed to subside last month, when Gilead agreed to donate enough pills to cover 200,000 patients over about a decade, but now two lawmakers want a probe into just how Truvada came to be.

As STAT’s Ed Silverman reports, a pair of Democrats are asking the Government Accountability Office to look into how the feds handle patents and licenses when a new drug traces at least some of its development to taxpayer-funded science.

If, in fact, Truvada’s intellectual property is cribbed from public-sponsored research, “this would mean that a private entity has generated billions of dollars in revenue over several years while infringing on government-owned intellectual property, and that the government either failed to detect the infringement or was aware but failed to prevent it.”

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