Event

February 10, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall

The Story of Sovaldi^™: How Intellectual Property Matters In Places That Do Not Dr. Zahra Hayat University of British Columbia, Vancouver

ABSTRACT: Pakistan has among the world’s lowest drug prices, and almost no drug patents filed by Western multinational corporations. Despite the absence of these quintessential barriers to pharmaceutical access, it is afflicted by severe shortages of basic lifesaving and palliative drugs. Drawing from my broader research on these seeming paradoxes of access, in this talk I examine the unprecedented arrival in Pakistan of Silicon Valley-based company Gilead Sciences’ revolutionary Hepatitis C drug, Sovaldi, just a year after its U.S. launch. Priced at $84,000 per course—$1,000 per pill—in the U.S., Sovaldi was sold in Pakistan at only $2 per pill, enabling the government to establish free Hepatitis C treatment centers across the country. Complicating the common narrative of Gilead’s benevolence in bringing Sovaldi to Pakistan, I suggest that Pakistan’s insignificance in global pharmaceutical circuits was a paradoxical condition of possibility of its access to the drug. More broadly, I suggest that given the increasing prominence of biological drugs in new pharmaceutical development, understanding the relationship between intellectual property and access requires broadening our focus beyond patents to a broader rubric of ‘pharmaceutical intellectual property’, which exceeds any individual legal property form.

BIOGRAPHY: Zahra Hayat is a medical anthropologist and lawyer. She is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies (2024-2026). Her research lies at the intersection of medical anthropology and law, examining how global regimes of pharmaceutical pricing, intellectual property, and narcotics control shape access to lifesaving and palliative drugs in the Global South. Dr. Hayat received her PhD in Anthropology from UC Berkeley in 2022. She obtained her first law degree from Oxford University, followed by an LL.M. from Yale Law School. Before starting her PhD, she practiced law in the San Francisco Bay Area for five years as a mental health advocate for children in foster care, and subsequently as an intellectual property litigator. 

Please join us for a reception on Haskell’s mezzanine immediately following Dr. Hayat’s talk.