UNITAID’s Medicines Patent Pool which received it’s first patent late last year is now making more headway by entering into negotiations with several key HIV medicines patent holders. Patent pools work by allowing patent holders to share their IP with other parties via licences. The working of this patent pool in particular therefore relied on the key patent holders contributing their patents to the pool for it work. To the skeptics (me included) of how well this would work, there is definitely evidence of it making quick progress, considering how soon they have managed to enter into talks with Big Pharma. Of course, entering into talks doesn’t necessarily seal a deal, but it is a step in the right direction.
So far, as per their page which displays how the pharmaceutical companies have responded to requests to join this pool, F. Hoffman-La Roche, Gilead Sciences, Sequoia Pharmaceuticals, and ViiV Healthcare (a joint venture of GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer) have entered or are about to enter into negotiations. This would represent about half of their targeted medicines as well as some outside of the immediate priority list.
Here is a similar story
Not long ago there were those who doubted whether the Geneva-based Medicines Patent Pool would manage to persuade any of the big pharmaceutical companies that it was a reasonable idea to allow their patents on Aids drugs to be “pooled”. Unitaid, which works to improve access to medicines in developing countries and set it up, argued long and hard that the pool was necessary. It would allow generic manufacturers in countries like India and China to make legitimate cheap combinations of some of today’s advanced HIV medicines. Cheap new combinations are going to be vital in the fight to keep millions alive in the developing world as HIV inevitably develops resistance to the basic drugs now available in poor countries.
An important issue here is not just if the big patent-holding firms will contribute to the patent pool but also the terms and conditions by which they do so. A firm may make a patented molecule available, but it may do so only on the grounds that any FDCs including it can only be sold in LDC markets. Such terms would probably have dampening effects on any generic firms’ incentives to bother going through the effort to conduct research on the molecules and manufacture FDCs. At least that’s been the big concern so far, so the bottom line is that while more participation by patent-holding firms is good it’s not a yes or no variable and we have to wait to see what sort of agreements the MPP is able to reach with these firms.
Dear Swaraj,
I know of at least 2 people who attended the event and I assure you, they do not share your enthusiasm.
What I have been is that while every large Company made a lot of ‘noise’, at the end there was not much real commitment.
The Patent Pool Initiative is now quite some years old… but you are yet to see even the concrete terms of a ‘typical’ license.
Similarly, there is no case of any Patent holder having actually put its patents in the Pool… while these same Companies have done a lot of one to one license.
Anon.
isn’t pooling similar to cross licensing? you share your IP by licensing..correct me if i am wrong..
That is a well written article.