Posts Tagged: "health care"

Severing the Link Between IP and Biomedical Innovation Isn’t the Answer to Global Health Care Challenges

The cost of medicines is on the agenda this week at the World Health Organization’s annual executive board meeting in Geneva. Nongovernmental organizations and certain middle-income countries argue that market-based drug development—reliant on intellectual property rights (IPRs) as its primary incentive—makes medicines too expensive. It fails, they say, to provide cures for those most in need but least able to pay. On the fringes of meetings such as the one happening this week, nongovernmental organizations talk excitedly about a new model for drug development, in which research and development (R&D) costs are “delinked” from the final prices of drugs. They join notables such as U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. One of the main “delinkage” proposals is to replace the patent system with government-managed prizes.

What Impact Will Wearable Devices Have on the Healthcare Industry?

Technology integrated with health tools is a becoming a very popular trend within the healthcare industry and is increasingly being used on a more regular basis. Many of the wearable devices are providing a plethora of health data that can be used to inform both personal and clinical decisions for consumers utilize the growing roster of available tools. These popular do-dads range from fitness trackers to wearable heart rate monitors. Many are saying these devices will change the way we live and interact with technology from a physical perspective.

IBM sales slump continues but Watson is getting brighter

Despite shrinking revenues, IBM may be able to chart its way back to stability if success continues for its Watson cognitive computing platform, the corporation’s fastest growing division by revenues and one which is proving applicable to a surprising range of industries. To profile IBM’s recent research and development related to Watson, we thought that we’d profile a series of data analytic and predictive modeling technologies for which IBM has been issued patents. For example, the evaluation of medical diagnoses for evaluating predictionaccuracy is detailed within U.S. Patent No. 9,235,808, entitled Evaluation of Predictions in the Absence of a Known Ground Truth. It claims a method to evaluate a prediction that a patient has a given disease by collecting a plurality of clinical data from each patient.

Distorting Innovation: Fixed Patent Terms and Underinvestment in Long-term Research

Drugs for the treatment of late-stage cancers are less expensive to develop, in part because late-stage drugs extend patients’ lives for a shorter period of time such that clinical trials are concluded more quickly. This means that such drugs require less time to research, develop, test and bring to market than drugs that treat earlier stage cancers, providing the innovator with a longer effective patent life. In essence, less research and development investment is directed toward drugs that treat patient groups requiring lengthy clinical trials, those with longer commercialization lags… It’s worthwhile to ask whether a ‘one-size-fits-all’ patent policy is optimal. How we can think creatively about patent protection in an effort to incentivize the innovation we want and push the frontiers of modern medicine.

Undermining Innovation in Health Care is Bad for Patients

Even if one disregards the categorical distinctions between over-ruling the ITC order and foreign compulsory licenses, there are differences in the specifics as well. For example, the Administration’s decision rested heavily on the fact that the patent being violated was part of an industry standard. A patent that is critical to an industry standard can convey market power (and possibly monopoly power) on that patent holder. The Administration focused on and justified its decision based on avoiding abuse of that market power. Patents on medicine are completely different. There is rigorous competition, new medicines can be invented to treat the same malady, and there is no need for the types of industry standards that are more common in electronics. But it is those health care patents that foreign governments are undermining.