Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz (Economics, 2001) and John Sulston (Physiology/Medicine, 2002) argue that the patent regime, along with other forms of intellectual monopoly powers, locks down access to knowledge rather than allowing its dissemination.

Both were speaking at the launch of Manchester University’s new Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation:

Patent monopolies are believed to drive innovation but they actually impede the pace of science and innovation, Stiglitz said. The current “patent thicket,” in which anyone who writes a successful software programme is sued for alleged patent infringement, highlights the current IP system’s failure to encourage innovation, he said.

Sulston made the privatisation of science his topic:

Reversing the trend toward privatisation of science is critical, Sulston said. The world should concentrate on the survival and thriving of humanity, and exploration of the universe, he said. The outcome, he added, depends to a great extent on “who owns science.”

via IP-Watch

How can society ensure that knowledge goods, which are both costly to create and potentially non-rival in use, can be shared freely?

There is little doubt that the current approach to rewarding the development of new medicines or diagnostic devices has severe deficiencies. Patent enforced monopolies often lead to high
prices. Critics also say that this system often fails to stimulate investment in areas of public interest and priority.

The prize system provides an appealing solution by encouraging new approaches to this thorny issue. If the incentive for innovation can be divorced from the product’s consumer price, then knowledge
goods — including the R&D for a new medicine — can be placed in the public domain immediately, so that competition among suppliersleads to low prices and greater access to new medical inventions.

Prizes can be implemented in many different ways. For donors and governments in particular, prizes might offer an alternative to marketing monopolies as the reward for successful investments in R&D.

Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) and UNU-MERIT are calling for papers on the use of monetary prizes as an alternative mechanism to stimulate private investments in R&D.

Participation is open to anyone. Winners will be selected by a jury of high-profile experts. The deadline for contributions is February 15, 2008. Papers should be between four and 20 pages, and must be submitted under a licence allowing unlimited distribution, such as an appropriate Creative Commons licence.

Awards:

• Winning paper: EUR 1500.
• Two runners-up: EUR 500.-
• The three top-ranked papers will be published in the Knowledge Ecology Studies journal.

Successful papers will deal with one or more of the following questions:

1. Relation to exclusive rights of a patent: Should prizes beconsidered as a voluntary or non-voluntary alternative to the exclusive rights now associated with the patent system, or as acomplementary reward?

2. Valuation: How does one determine the size of prizes?

3. Push vs. pull: Where to use research grants (”push”), where to prefer prizes (”pull”) to finance drug development?

4. Sustainable financing: Where should the prize money come from, and will the prospect of prizes be credible?

5. Follow-on innovation: How will prizes deal with the need for incentives for follow-on innovation?

6. Transition: How can the transition from the current monopoly-based system be organized?

For questions and submissions, please send email to Malini Aisola and Karsten Gerloff <prizeprize@merit.unu.edu>. More information will soon be available at ccp.merit.unu.edu/prizeprize.

KEI and UNU-MERIT are looking forward to your contributions.

Jamie Love’s letter to the World Health Organisation asking for an overhaul of the Essential Medicines List (EDL). He points out that using cost as a determinant for inclusion in the list is a problemetic way to determine if a medicine is “essential”. It turns out that only 14 (12 on the core list and 2 on the complimentary list) of the 312 medicines on the list are protected by patents that prevent production of cheaper generic versions. While some argue that this indicates that patents are in fact not preventing the poor from accessing “essential medicines”, a closer look reveals that the opposite is the case. Since price is one factor that determines if a medicine is included in the list, it is the premium that consumers pay for patented medicines that keeps them out of the list – regardless if they are “essential” from a health perspective or not. Not a single patent protected anti-cancer drug made it onto the core list – not essential enough?

Since developing countries enjoy some flexibility under the current TRIPs regime to address their urgent health-care needs, the WHO would be well advised to compile a list of truly “essential” medicines, which could then be procured affordably through the use of compulsory licensing and generic substitutes – at a much lower cost.

Full letter is at the cptech.org website.

The intent of the Essential Medicines List (EDL) is to present “a list of minimum medicine needs for a basic health care system, listing the most efficacious, safe and cost-effective medicines for priority conditions,” where priority diseases themselves are identified in part on the basis of the potential for cost-effective treatment. Given that countries are free to use various means, such as compulsory licenses, to increase access to medical products that can improve the public health, it is appropriate to reassess the role that cost – especially as reflected under current patent medicine pricing regimes – plays in this evaluation.

…

The existence of a WHO “Essential Medicines List” which clearly does not contain many truly essential medicines may be confusing for public health officials and others and provide rhetorical fodder to those who oppose intellectual property flexibilities for health.

...

Patented medicines currently available only at prohibitive prices may nonetheless offer the “potential for cost-effective treatment” as countries have the opportunity to legally produce or import generic
versions. More critical to the evaluation of cost effectiveness under the emerging system is the true marginal cost of production, which bears little or no relationship to the market price in developed countries.

We believe that it is more appropriate that the Essential Medicines List reflect the opportunity that many countries have to obtain currently patented drugs at generic prices by assessing cost-effectiveness not only on the basis of current market prices, but also on the basis of potential generic prices if countries were to avail themselves of their right to exercise TRIPS flexibilities, including the granting of compulsory licenses. Developing countries in particular might stand to benefit from a model WHO Essential Medicines List that does not exclude essential patented medicines by ignoring the potential that those drugs could be obtained more cheaply. A welcome side-effect of this change would be an “Essential Medicines List" that more fully reflects the range of truly essential medicines, where essential reflects both the need for treatments and the costs of meeting those needs unburdened by patent rents.

...

We released this policy brief a few weeks ago in prepration for the Symposium on Open Standards and the new intellectual property rights paradigms that are coming out of the various ‘open’ movements (open science, open source software, open medicine, etc.).

Because the policy brief is a bit hidden away on the merit website, I thought it made sense to post a link to it from the A2K blog. Please note that to get a list of relevant UNU publications that we have mentioned on the blog, you can select the “publications” category link in the navigation menu.

The policy brief is here (http://www.merit.unu.edu/publications/pb/unu_pb_2006_01.pdf)

UNU-MERIT holds Research Symposium on “Open Source” and “Open Medicine” at UN Headquarters

UPDATE – Audio recordings of all presentations are now available here (http://www.merit.unu.edu/seminars/20060413_abstracts/report.php).

Can an Intellectual Property regime designed to protect private interests be reformed to open up standards and knowledge? What results when government authorities promote free, open source software in their jurisdictions? Who (if anyone) should own or control access to the human genome sequence? What parallels can be drawn with the fundamental principles of ‘openness’ for science and society as a whole?
These are among the issues to be discussed at a Research Symposium titled Challenging Intellectual Property Access to Knowledge Issues in Open Source and Medicine, at the UN Headquarters, New York, on 13 April 2006 . The event is co-organized by the United Nations University -Office at the United Nations, New York , and UNU-MERIT.

The speakers include:
Louis-Dominique Ouédraogo, Retiring Inspector, UN Joint Inspection Unit;
Tim Hubbard, Head of Human Genome Analysis, The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK;
Tadao Takahashi, Principal Investigator at Project Foresight ICTs-2015, Centre for Strategic Studies in Brazil; and
Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Senior Researcher, UNU-MERIT.

The event is open to interested members of the public. Registration forms can be downloaded from the website of the UNU Office at the United Nations , New York .

Please also read our related policy brief (401KB pdf).

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