Some 500 people living with HIV/Aids and activists yesterday demonstrated outside the Bangkok office of one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, GlaxoSmithKline, to protest against its application for a patent on a key anti-retroviral treatment.

The protesters said a patent would grant Glaxo a monopoly on the drug Combid, which forms part of the standard treatment for people with HIV/Aids in Thailand. The Government Pharmaceutical Organisation (GPO) currently manufactures an affordable generic version called Zilarvir.

"Glaxo is selling its Combid at about Bt8,300 for 60 tablets [a month's prescription] while the GPO drug sells for only Bt1,500. If Glaxo is granted the patent, the GPO would no longer be able to produce its generic version and the Glaxo product's price could even rise in the absence of any competition," said Wirat Purahong, chairperson of the Thai Network of People Living With HIV/Aids.

Wirat said about 8,000 infected people nationwide needed the drug, which combined two existing anti-retroviral drugs, lamivudine and zidovudine. The protesters claimed Glaxo had no right to apply for a patent for Combid since its blending of two medicines did not constitute an invention.

After the building had been blockaded for two hours, a representative of Glaxo Thailand met the demonstrators and accepted an open letter containing the protesters' demands. The representative, however, told them it was a policy of the Glaxo headquarters in the United Kingdom - not its Bangkok office - to apply for patent protection.

The protesters said their demonstration was organised with the support of foreign organisations including Doctors Without Borders; Positive Malaysian Treatment Access & Advocacy Group; Intellectual Property Left, Korea; the US-based Health Global Access Project; and the Health Right Network of Korea.

Responding by email to The Nation's inquiries, Glaxo said it "disputes the claims of … NGOs that Glaxo would seek to reduce access and availability of anti-retrovirals". It did not elaborate.

In February, protesters met Commerce Permanent Secretary Karun Kittisataporn, who oversees the Department of Intellectual Property (DIP), to put forward their argument that people living with HIV/Aids would be severely disadvantaged if a patent was granted to Glaxo.

The drug firm has already been granted patents for Combid in the US and Europe. It applied for patent registration in Thailand in 1998. The application is being reviewed by a committee set up by Karun. People living with HIV/Aids and academics earlier appealed to the committee, saying Combid did not deserve to be patented.

Seksan Boonsuwan, director of the DIP's Patent Division, said in a telephone interview yesterday that he could not intervene in the committee's decision-making process, and that the final decision would be made by the department.

The protesters' appeal would be considered, he said.

Seksan agreed that if a patent was granted to Glaxo, not only would people with HIV have to pay more for the drug, but the GPO could be sued by the giant firm for patent violation if it continued to produce a generic version.

Dr Mongkol Jiwasantikarn, the GPO's director, said if the patent was granted, the GPO would stop manufacturing Zilarvir, which now has a total market value of about Bt300 million annually.

"We are not worried about our income, but about the health of infected people. I don't know how they will be able to afford the patented drug," he said.