Original news and analysis on international IP policy
An unusual meeting is taking place at the World Intellectual Property Organization this week, bringing together entrepreneurs in water and sanitation technology and business models with prospective investors, including clean-tech venture capitalists, private equity and corporate investors.
Cardiovascular diseases (CVD), a group of conditions that can result in heart attacks and strokes, is the world’s number one killer, accounting for one-third of deaths throughout the world, according to research released recently (17 May) by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington.
It is not a mystery, cancer has been spreading for decades, in particular in low and-middle income countries, and is not stopping its course in the foreseeable future. Members of the World Health Organization in committee yesterday adopted a resolution to improve prevention, diagnostics, treatment, and palliative care for cancer, in statements stripped of controversy.
What if you get an aggressive form of breast cancer, and the treatment exists but it is too expensive for you to get? You die. Tragic stories and the possibilities to avert them were centre stage at a panel last week on the margin of the ongoing World Health Assembly. Delinking the cost of research and development from the market prices of medicines was urged by speakers on the panel: representatives of cancer patients, civil society, and the Brazilian deputy ambassador.
World Health Assembly Agenda Item 13.5 is descriptively-yet-uninformatively labelled “Follow-up of the report of the Consultative Expert Working Group on Research and Development: Financing and Coordination (CEWG).” But that anodyne title actually masks an important milestone in the World Health Organization’s long-running efforts to increase R&D around neglected diseases and diseases of poverty.
Member governments of the World Health Organization are increasingly talking about how to bring about “fair” pricing of medicines. And what’s clear is that it should not be based on how much you would pay to save your life, a senior WHO official said this week.
The World Intellectual Property Organization this week has striven to show its commitment to contributing to the debate on intellectual property and health, and the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, through advancement of its Re:Search program for the next five years.
With global funding for research and development decreasing, and the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance, ways to incentivise research are seen as key to solving the problem. Speakers at a side event to the World Health Assembly this week presented models of public and private partnerships to address the issue.
The World Health Organization has launched a public consultation on the Draft Research and Development Blueprint Material Transfer Agreement tool text.
Transparency” and “accountability” are familiar buzzwords. Like salt and pepper, they pop up on nearly every list of ingredients for sound policy and good governance. But, as Ilona Kickbusch and Suerie Moon of the Graduate Institute Global Health Centre in Geneva point out, their details are rarely specified: transparency for what? Accountability to whom? On Tuesday afternoon, those not busy casting a vote for the next World Health Organization director general got the chance to dig into these questions at a panel co-sponsored by the Graduate Institute and FIND. In particular, discussion focused on transparency in terms of public access to two types of information: drug R&D costs and clinical trial data.