Eurasian Community for Access to Treatment, ECAT unites access to treatment activists and experts in HIV, hepatitis and tuberculosis fields. The community was created by International Treatment Preparedness Coalition in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ITPCru) in 2016.
ECAT’s mission: we work for timely and comprehensive access to up-to-date diagnostics and treatment of HIV, hepatitis and tuberculosis.
Our main goal is increasing of patients’ community expertise in access to diagnostics and treatment issues for effective work to change the situation for better in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
ECAT’s objectives:
- Providing technical support to patients’ organizations for their work aimed to access to diagnostics and treatment improvement
- Ensuring dialog between patients’ organizations, access to treatment experts, representatives of pharmaceutical companies, international agencies and state authorities to discuss key issues related to access to treatment and diagnostics.
- Organizing educational events for EECA patients’ communities representatives
- Collecting and sharing information related to diagnostics and treatment accessibility in EECA
Main directions of our work:
- Introduction of innovative drugs in EECA: treatment standards and guidelines, restrictive lists, registration and pricing issues.
- Price decreasing to the level which allows expanding access to diagnostics and treatment in conditions of patent monopoly: procurement mechanisms, comparative analysis of prices in different countries etc.
- Balance maintaining between defensing of public health interests and intellectual property rights: using mechanisms aimed to patent barriers overcoming (voluntary licensing, patent oppositions, compulsory licensing, and optimization of IP legislation).
- Accessibility, affordability and quality of generics: compliance with GMP standards, WHO prequalification, pharmacovigilance.
We work for: Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Ukraine.