Today's Financial Times has an article by Andrew Jack on the request by
162 leading scientists, public health experts, NGOs, academics, members
of parliaments, government officials and others, asking WHO to evaluate
a proposal for a treaty for medical R&D. The letter is on the CIPIH web
site at this address:
http://www.who.int/intellectualproperty/submissions/en/CPTech.pdf, and
also is available in French and Spanish, along with the actual text of
the proposed treaty (also in three languages) here:
http://www.cptech.org/workingdrafts/rndtreaty.html
The proposed treaty addresses the major trade issues concerning
medicine, and is an alternative pardigm that could replace TRIPS or
various TRIPS plus trade agreements on intellectual property or drug
prices, for the covered products. The proposal requires every member
country to support medical R&D to a fraction of its GDP, but is
flexiable on the mechanisms that would qualify, including not only
incentives for R&D from intellectual property protection or high drug
prices, but also from public sector R&D, or new open source development
efforts. The treaty deals with a wide range of issues, including
priority setting, the preservation and dissemination of traditional
medical knowledge, technology transfer and capacity building, and the
creation of public goods, such as open scientific databases like the
Human Genome or the HapMap project. It proposes a new system of
"Kyoto-style" credits that researchers/companies/countries could earn by
investing in projects of particular priorty need or public interest.
Below is the URL and the text of the FT article.
James Love
Consumer Project on Technology
james.love@cptech.org
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/67e10ff8-86d4-11d9-8075-00000e2511c8.html
WHO members urged to sign Kyoto-style medical treaty
By Andrew Jack in London
Published: February 25 2005 02:00
Countries around the world should sign up to a Kyoto-style treaty
designed to boost medical innovation and affordable treatment, according
to a petition submitted yesterday to the World Health Organisation by
non-governmental organisations, academics and politicians.
Member states should pledge to invest a percentage of their gross
domestic product in medical innovation, and would be allowed to trade
"credits" with others through a mechanism similar to that in the Kyoto
protocol designed to reduce environmental emissions.
They should also consider redirecting funding away from a traditional
model based on intellectual property protection, and encourage the use
of open sourcing to stimulate the sharing of information among medical
researchers.
The letter, which draws on a draft medical research and development
treaty drawn up over the past two years, is part of a broader debate on
how to boost innovative research and development at a time when the
"pipelines" of new medicines of the large pharmaceutical groups have
been drying up.
It is also designed to address concerns that the current system does not
have the incentives to encourage research into finding treatments for
many "neglected diseases" in the developing world, which affect millions
of people with only modest means to pay for medicines.
The treaty is supported by organisations including the International Red
Cross, Oxfam and Midecins sans Frontihres, as well as leading medical
researchers and intellectual property specialists.
Those involved in the lobbying effort are discussing an initiative by
member countries within the WHO to raise the issue at the World Health
Assembly in May.
Jamie Love, head of the Consumer Project on Technology in Washington,
DC, one of the originators of the idea, said the current emphasis placed
on intellectual property protection of drug patents by the World Trade
Organisation did little directly to find new cures.
"The aim of this treaty is to refocus the debate away from drug prices
and patents, and towards innovation and access," he said. "We want to
shift more attention to the priority-setting process."
He said large pharmaceutical companies opposed the idea of the research
and development treaty.