NIH Weighing Government Authority Over Drug Pricing.

Abbott Laboratories and AIDS activists clashed today, as of May 25, 2004, during an National Institutes of Health (NIH) meeting over whether the government should step in to lower the price of a popular drug that was developed in part using government grant money. AIDS advocates and others urged the NIH to use its authority provided in an often-overlooked provision in a 1980 law to issue a license for the manufacturing of generic copies of patent-protected Norvir, after Abbott increased prices by 400 percent in December 2003. The law includes a "march-in" provision, allowing the government to offer generic licenses if a patent developed using government funds was misused.