E-DRUG: Access to Medicines in Under-served Markets: overview (2)
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dear E-druggers,
I've just finished reading the summary. It is well done and touches on the main points very well. It provides a sound outline for future work in this area. I particularly liked the recommendations at the end of the first section. It was interesting to note that more of the recommendations concern policy issues for drug regulatory agencies. I was interested to see that there was little discussion of the consideration that patents are granted by individual countries and thus the granting and disposition of the patents are matters to be dealt with by the governments of each country. I believe this is where the true flexibilities of TRIPS exist - not in compulsory licensing and parallel trade. Inventors will have to decide in how many countries they wish to file patents, how much they will invest in obtaining those patents, how much they will invest in protecting those patents, etc. It seems to me that a major pharmaceutical company will be very strategic and will seek and protect wide international patent protection only on those products that have the greatest profit potential. Also they will be very strategic about not appearing to be bad citizens. Thus for products for diseases that affect only the poor, I wonder if TRIPS is a worry. For products that affect both the poor and the rich, various mechanisms such as imaginative management of IP by the public sector, tiered pricing, sublicensing (voluntary outlicensing) for local production to supply the poor, production in countries where patents have not been filed, and others should be of use. I believe these areas are where the greatest efforts in building capacity in developing countries should go. For products that affect only the rich, well... that's not our main worry.
DFID is to be congratulated for launching this work. More work is needed especially research that collects and analyzes good data. It seems that the work now may suffer a bit from an imbalance between evidence-based analysis and speculation.
Rich
Richard T. Mahoney, Ph.D
Research Professor
Biodesign Institute
Arizona State University
PO Box 874501
Tempe, AZ 85287
Tel: +1 (928) 203-0172
Fax: +1 (928) 222-0074
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Web: http://sols.asu.edu/faculty/rmahoney.htm
richard.mahoney@asu.edu
Senior Advisor and Member of the Board of Trustees
MIHR
Oxford Centre for Innovation
Oxford, UK
Mailing address:
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Sedona, AZ 86336
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