The Supreme Court has denied Novartis a patent for its anti-cancer drug Gleevec. This leaves the door open for Indian pharmaceutical companies to produce their own versions of the drug. Since these are sold at roughly one tenth of the patented brand price, for thousands of cancer patients it means the difference between medicine and no medicine at all…It is not just cancer patients that will benefit, but millions of people dependent on medicines for survival, including those with HIV, diabetes, hepatitis and more. Had the judgement gone the other way, it would have set a precedent for other big pharmaceutical companies to simply make minor modifications to any existing medicines to receive fresh patents.