Posts Tagged: "pharmaceuticals"

IP Valuation for the Preservation of Public Health: Managing IP in the Age of COVID-19

Certainly, patents that read on a potential cure for COVID-19 deserve special treatment. After all, the cure for COVID-19 is not only crucial to save lives all over the world, but also to avoid the collapse of the global economy. Yet, what such special treatment might look like and how special a treatment is necessary is where opinions diverge. In the United States, activists demand that the government should have the rights to the anti-retro viral drug, ‘Remdesivir’. The Open Covid Pledge proposes that all IP related to COVID-19 should be made freely available. Its founding adopters were technology companies such as Facebook, Microsoft, Intel, IBM and Amazon. In contrast, among pharmaceutical companies, the idea of giving up all related IP for free has been viewed critically. With this in mind, the question is therefore not whether patents related to COVID-19  should be given away for free or not, but rather how the profit motive can be managed in public- private partnerships for the benefit of public health.

WHO’s C-TAP Initiative Pushes for Non-Exclusive Global Licensing Amid Pharma Industry Concerns

On Friday, May 29, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially launched the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP), an initiative which is intended to improve access to treatments, vaccines and other medical technologies which are developed in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic. The program, initially proposed by Costa Rica, has highlighted the tension between pharmaceutical developers and advocates for access to medicine, which has been magnified by the economic concerns created during the global shutdown.

Efforts to Villainize Biotech, Pharma over COVID-19 are Political Theater and Opportunism

If the objective is to beat this virus as fast as possible it simply isn’t helpful to talk about the compulsory licensing of drugs that don’t yet exist and the patents that can’t possibly be issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office for at least the next two to three years. The COVID-19 crisis will be long since over by the time the first patent issues relating to anything specifically related to COVID-19. Yet somehow it is viewed as productive to demand compulsory licensing of vaccines, treatments and cures for COVID-19 that do not exist?

Innovators Rush to Solve Coronavirus Pandemic While Countries Contemplate Compulsory Licensing

Since China announced the first fatality caused by a virus about which little was known at the time, coronavirus and the disease it causes, COVID-19, has grown to pandemic proportions. In the less than three months since that first death, this new strain of the severe acute respiratory syndrome-related (SARS) coronavirus has shuttered social gatherings, precipitated a mandatory work-from-home revolution and decimated large parts of the world’s economy. As of the afternoon of March 27, the Coronavirus Resource Center at Johns Hopkins University reports that more than 585,000 cases of COVID-19 infection have been confirmed worldwide, resulting in a total of 26,819 deaths. Those figures have been increasing exponentially each day.

We Won’t Stop Coronavirus Without IP

The recent White House meeting with leaders from American pharmaceutical companies sought their help in solving the coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China and is currently gripping the globe. The meeting was part of the U.S. government marshaling our nation’s private and public medical research and development (R&D) resources in a race to create therapeutics, vaccines, diagnostic tools and cures. The Wall Street Journal has noted that “a core U.S. strength is the breadth of its private medical resources. That’s on display now as the government is calling on private actors to buttress the federal response.” Ironically, the same U.S. government urging the same private industry whose intellectual property rights enable it to develop medical miracles to help is targeting American pharmaceutical firms with a number of IP-killing policy proposals. One such bad idea comes from the Food & Drug Administration in a rulemaking titled “Importation of Prescription Drugs Proposed Rule (Docket No. FDA-2019-N-5711).”