UN health company Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) said on Tuesday that it has extended its 2013 licensing agreement with Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) to further increase access to atazanavir (ATV), part of the World Health Organizsation-preferred second-line treatment for adults and children living with HIV (PLHIV).

This amendment was announced during an MPP-jointly hosted satellite at the 9th International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Science in Paris on 25 July 2017.

The amendment reportedly adds 12 countries to the 110 included in the original 2013 agreement. The additional countries are: Algeria, Cook Islands, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Morocco, Niue, the Philippines, Tunisia, Ukraine and Vietnam, which is home to 1.4m people living with HIV (PLHIV).

In conjunction, the agreement now covers 89% of PLHIV in low- and middle-income countries. The extension allows an additional 1.4m people living with HIV to benefit from sublicensed generics of World Health Organization-recommended antiretroviral.

Since the MPP and BMS signed the licensing agreement for ATV in December 2013, the MPP's six generic manufacturing partners have distributed 98m doses of the treatment, equivalent to a quarter of a million patient-years, to 63 countries.