Treaty proposal addresses problem of global access to essential medicines
The Center for the Study of the Public Domain continued its Information Ecology lecture series on November 4, with a discussion of a proposed research and development (“R&D”) treaty designed to facilitate global access to essential medicines. James Love, director of the Consumer Project on Technology, explained the treaty, which would establish a new trade framework for funding R&D.
Love began by describing the following problem: even when the patent system works as designed, it will not supply adequate medicines to the global poor, because poor populations don’t have enough money to provide the necessary market. Medicines that treat diseases such as AIDS and cancer are priced beyond the reach of most of the people in developing countries, and medicines that would treat diseases affecting only small or impoverished populations are often not developed at all.
“We want to fix things,” Love said of the proposal he developed with Tim Hubbard, head of human genome analysis at the Sanger Institute in Britain. “We want to change the trade framework from one that focuses solely on the protection of property rights to one that ensures global investment in R&D. We don’t care solely about patents, but about what patents are supposed to induce, which is investment and innovation. Patents in our model are a tool and not an end in themselves.”
The proposed treaty would provide target norms for individual countries’ contributions to healthcare R&D, which would be based on a percentage of GDP. Countries could choose from a range of alternative funding mechanisms in order to reach these targets.
“Patents, prizes, directed research, open and collaborative research, entrepreneurial research... The goal here is to give people the freedom to experiment with different business models and learn from each other; they don’t all have to fund R&D the same way,” Love explained.
In addition, social credits would be awarded for contributions to priorities such as research on neglected diseases and vaccines, technology transfer, and preservation and dissemination of medical knowledge. “You can either make genuine expenditures, or gain credits,” Love observed. “This is a system for creating public goods and for creating a currency for public goods.”
This lecture was the first in a series of events sponsored by the Center that will focus on stimulating innovation through alternatives and supplements to the traditional intellectual property system.
“We want to open up a debate about how we might encourage and reward innovation when the traditional system does not provide adequate incentives,” said Jennifer Jenkins ’97, the Center’s director.
“A New Trade Framework for Global Healthcare Research and Development,” by Tim Hubbard and James Love is available at
http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=get-document&
doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0020052.