Canada's largest owned pharmaceutical company Apotex Inc, has announced its new triple combination HIV/AIDS drug Apo-TriAvir. It has been approved under Canada's Access to Medicines Regime (CAMR), which is ready to be shipped to Rwanda in Africa, the only country to make a request through a program tender process. The first shipment of seven million tablets, which would help save the lives of 21,000 people. Apotex is undertaking such a task on a humanitarian, not-for-profit basis.

According to Jack Kay, President, Apotex Inc., no other country had tried to provide medicines under this regime and was please to take up such an important and historic contribution towards a worldly cause. He went on to say that it was too complex and had to be repeated for every request that came in from a country. For Canada to truly be able to provide help, the regime must be changed. Apo-TriAvir would save lives the moment the patients had access to it but it was up to the federal government to fix CAMR, he said.

It should be noted that Canada's Access to Medicines Regime came into force in May 2004 and is meant to allow Canadian generic drug makers to legally produce patented, brand-name drugs for export to developing countries. The Canadian regime was based on a 2003 World Trade Organization (WTO) to allow developing countries to import lower-cost medicines to their population's desperate need. After almost four and a half years in the CAMR process, Apotex was the only company to have submitted, received approval, and then negotiated through the very complex CAMR process.

Apotex competed against pharmaceutical companies from around the world in the tender to supply this AIDS drug. A second shipment of seven million doses was scheduled to leave in September 2009.

This was an important and exciting time for Apotex and all of its employees who worked so hard for so long with the hope of making a difference. Despite the many hurdles and setbacks the company had suffered due to this ineffective regime. Its employees had persevered and now was in a position to make a direct impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who desperately needed such help, said Kay.

Apotex has 6,000 employees in Canada and manufactures 300 medicines which are exported to 115 countries. It has over 600 products under development with planned R&D expenditures of $2 billion over the next 10 years.