Original news and analysis on international IP policy
The Medicines Patent Pool announced today that it signed a first licence for a hepatitis C drug with Bristol-Myers Squibb. The agreement allows manufacturing of daclatasvir, royalty-free in 112 low-and middle-income countries.
This week the World Health Organization member state mechanism on falsified medicines is meeting in Geneva with a long agenda. In particular, the meeting is expected to consider a process for the mechanism review, the participation of the WHO in a global committee on the quality of health products, and several proposals including tracking systems and awareness campaigns.
Saying she could speak more freely outside of the World Health Organization, WHO Director General Margaret Chan today told a gathering of think tank representatives at the Graduate Institute of Geneva that intellectual property rights may be unfairly driving up drug prices and that industry lobbying may be interfering with governments' efforts to take action on behalf of their citizens' public health.
A recent workshop on patentability criteria illustrated how countries are using the policy space provided by international trade rules to calibrate their patent law. In particular, incremental innovation remains a trying issue for national legislators, speakers said.
The Medicines Patent Pool has announced the expansion of its mandate to cover hepatitis C and tuberculosis treatment. The MPP was previously concentrating only on HIV medicines.
Last week's decision by a World Trade Organization committee to allow least-developed countries to not apply global IP rules for pharmaceuticals for 17 more years made WTO members accountable to humanity, the coordinator of the LDC Group has said. Pharmaceuticals are different from all other forms of IP, he said.
Patent offices should align their work in support of national health and medicines policies when carrying out the examination of patents, a new South Centre paper argues.
According to a prominent researcher in the field of neglected tropical diseases, the World Intellectual Property Organization has a prominent role to play in addressing the lack of research and development for neglected diseases.
A joint symposium of the World Health Organization, World Trade Organization and World Intellectual Property Organization this week included several panels on how trade, public health and intellectual property could positively interact to increase access to medicines.
A lively keynote address urging international organisations to adopt a fact-based view of the world and new ways of segmenting countries in an increasingly convergent world, set the scene for the annual trilateral symposium on public health, intellectual property and trade taking place at the World Trade Organization today.
Trade, health, and intellectual property came together today as the heads of three specialised international organisations held an annual symposium to stimulate discussions on how the three can best help public health, and notably access to medicines in developing countries.
World Health Organization members and stakeholders were invited to provide comments this month on the organisation’s framework to spur preparedness for future influenza pandemics and ensure treatments will reach developing countries. The framework is expected to undergo a review in 2016. The advisory group to the initiative also went through issues such as contributions by manufacturers, and how to deal with genetic sequence data.