Pharma at Gates charity
By Asha

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his wife set up the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which has spent tens of billions of dollars helping the poor and needy.  The Foundation has won millions of hearts and minds with its selfless social work in India and every corner of the world.

Non profit IP Watch, which reports on Intellectual Property, has raised a point about how Big Pharmaceutical companies may now have some influence at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation after it hired a senior executive from a Pharma company criticized by many Indian activists

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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has announced that Trevor Mundel has been named president of the foundation’s Global Health Program. Mundel is global head of development for Novartis Pharma in Basel, Switzerland and will start at Gates on 1 December.

The move may serve to solidify views that the Gates Foundation is oriented toward northern pharmaceutical industry practices, which have been called into question by developing countries in international fora in recent years. Novartis, a leader in the pharmaceutical industry, has been a target of ire from public health activists in India in recent years – with another flare-up in recent weeks – due to its efforts in the courts to weaken Indian patent law ostensibly to better allow “evergreening” of existing drug patents (IPW, Public Health, 6 September 2011). India is the world’s biggest supplier of generic drugs.

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