The Economist: Patently Absurd

The Economist recently published an interesting opinion article on the impact of innovation on the economy — specifically the negative impact of patent backlogs on business (particularly small entrepreneurial business).

Patently Absurd

INNOVATION and jobs have become a modern version of motherhood and apple pie in Washington, DC. Everyone in America’s capital wants lots more of both, or so they say. So how come Congress and the White House have decided not merely to underfund a crucial cog in American’s innovation machine but actually to take away revenue it earns? And that at a time when that cog, the Patent and Trademark Office, is already struggling to keep up with the growing demands upon it? The recent budget deal for fiscal 2011 (the year to September 30th) allows the Patent Office to spend only $2.1 billion. That is less than it expects to collect in fees from applicants—$100m or so will disappear instead into Treasury coffers—and far less than it needs to do its job properly.

Access barriers to medicines and health: Op-Ed

Canadian MP Keith Martin recently wrote an interesting Op-Ed for the Edmonton Journal on the challenges of providing access to medicines and health for the world’s poorest.  He notes that lack of infrastructure, access to trained health workers, potable water and sanitation are the real barriers to access to medicines and care — not patents.

98.6 per cent of ‘essential medicines’ are generic or are not patented in developing countries, but for those living on $2 a day even generic drugs are too expensive (when available).

Tinkering with patent laws won’t get medicine to world’s poorest

The debate around enabling the world’s poorest people to acquire life-saving medications is coming to a head. This week, Parliament votes on a bill that will modify Canada’s Access to Medications Regime (CAMR). If the bill becomes law, it will enable Canadian generic manufacturers to produce and sell medications that are currently under patent protection to developing countries. On the surface this makes sense. But are patents really the obstacle proponents of the bill claim to enabling the poor to access drugs for AIDS and other diseases?

Every year, the World Health Organization (WHO) convenes an independent panel of experts, chosen equally from developing and developed countries, to draw up a list of essential medicines. Currently, 319 drugs are on this list.

Of these, 98.6 per cent are generic or are not patented in developing countries. Thus, the life-saving medications the poor needs are already off patent. Generic manufacturers can make them today if they wish. Therefore, patents are not the problem.

WIPO to support innovation in Nigeria

World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has announced plans to strengthen Nigeria’s technology innovation centres with particular reference to the Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer Offices (IPTTOs) established by the National Office for Technology Acquisition and Promotion (NOTAP) in tertiary institutions and research centres across the country.

WIPO will help strengthen existing national capacities through the creation of Technology Innovation Support Centres (TISC) – digital libraries comprising 70,000 specialized patents on-line.

These centres will be established in the universities not only to promote innovations but also to ensure that learning was linked to practical life.

According to Dr. Ituku Elangi Botoy, Project coordinator of the Innovation and Technology Support Section of WIPO, no country has developed without prioritizing science and technology and that Nigeria would not be an exception.

 

Access to medicines in India: feedback from a gov’t consultation on compulsory licensing

India’s Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion (managed by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry) recently released a Discussion Paper on Compulsory Licensing and invited feedback from civil society groups, industry, academia and other stakeholders to guide their formulation of a compulsory licensing policy.

The Discussion Paper expressed concern regarding the availability of new products and technologies in India, including medicines and other pharmaceutical products, and seeks to explore whether compulsory licensing could be a viable solution.

Many of the submitted comments, including those of foreign business lobbies, warned that a proposal to allow government-owned or private companies to manufacture products and technologies patented by other companies, to ensure they are not in scarce supply, could discourage overseas investment in India.

Of particular interest was a submission by the Organization of Pharmaceutical Producers of India, which noted that:

Even a prima facie analysis of the situation in India would make it apparent that patents are not the primary cause for poor access to medicines in India.  Sales of patented products account for much less than 1% of the Indian Pharmaceutical market.

Thus, compulsory licensing of patented medicines can have no meaningful impact on improving access to medicines for the vast majority of the Indian population who lack the financial capability to pay for even generic, off-patent, medicines that comprise even more than 99% or so of the Indian Pharmaceutical market.

Over the past several years, the experience in most middle and low-income countries has been that private-public partnerships and affordable publicly supported health insurance do much more to improve access to medicines.

We do not believe that compulsory licensing of patented inventions is a sustainable or viable course of action to address India’s healthcare challenges.   Proposals to promote the use of compulsory licenses could inhibit technological development in the pharmaceutical sector in India and thereby undermine efforts to make medicines and other products widely available to patients.

Other key points raised in the OPPI’s commentary included:

• The use of compulsory licensing is rarely the best policy option and cannot be a suitable tool to deal with the long-term healthcare issues confronting India.
• It has been demonstrated that patents are not a principal barrier to access to essential medicines, particularly here in India.  The World Health Organization (WHO) determined that during 2000-2007 period, India had significantly greater lack of access to essential medicines than many African countries, even though it had excluded pharmaceuticals from patent protection for almost 30 years.

The US-India Business Council (USIBC), which represents nearly 350 global companies, also expressed concern that adopting the proposed policy would inhibit the growth of intellectual property-intensive industries. It will create uncertainty and have a chilling effect on innovation and investment.  Similar views have been expressed by BusinessEurope, a European trade body, and Japan Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (JPMA), a drug industry lobby representing at least 68 top pharmaceutical companies in Japan.  (Source:  Livemint.com)

WSJ opinion – Africa’s Health Crisis

An interesting opinion from the Wall Street Journal about challenges and barriers to improving public health in Africa.

How to Worsen Africa’s Health Crisis: Killing off drug patents will kill off innovation and patients.

By ALEC VAN GELDER

Faced with Africa’s devastation by HIV/AIDS, people are looking for scapegoats. Global pressure groups and now the World Health Organization are targeting “Big Pharma.” The drug companies do make easy targets but that doesn’t make them villains. The life-saving treatments they create remain Africa’s best hope. The misguided battle against pharmaceutical companies’ patent rights will only make Africa’s health crisis worse.

Intellectual property rights for AIDS drugs are “the biggest public health challenge” as they make them too costly for most Africans, Hans Hogerzeil, head of the WHO’s Essential Medicines program, recently said. They are “a barrier to access,” he previously claimed, but the real barriers are the lack of infrastructure and the diversion of aid money. Fewer than 5% of WHO’s 423 Essential Medicines are currently protected by patents; mostly advanced “second-line” anti-AIDS medicines.

Why innovation is sometimes just as important as invention for pharmaceutical patents

An interesting article on incremental innovation, invention, access to medicines and IP — from Global Health Progress.

The Asian Age recently discussed the dilemma around the language of the Indian Patents Act, which requires “significant” improvements or efficacy in existing medicines for them to become eligible for pharmaceutical patents.  Reporter Deepak Joshi discusses the role of “incremental innovation” in many breakthrough inventions, including medical improvements like the new generation of HIV/AIDS treatments.  Joshi adds that these improvements, while not groundbreaking, nevertheless play an important role in medical progress.  Below is an excerpt from this article.

“In India, however, the debate about incremental innovations has become an unsettling one, particularly in the pharmaceutical sector. Section 3(d) of the Indian Patents Act has a controversial clause calling for “significant” improvement or efficacy in an existing compound to become eligible for a patent. Who defines “significant” and how? The issue is left delightfully vague.

Why does India more or less bar incremental innovations? There is a popular misperception that incremental innovations are unnecessary and will only result in more expensive medicines. The first point is plain wrong and the second one only half true. Of the 325 drugs on the World Health Organisation’s essential medicines list, 95 per cent are off-patent. This means they will be freely available to any drug manufacturer even if incremental innovation results in a better version also being in the market.

It is another matter that some two billion people worldwide don’t have access to these 325 drugs. That is an issue of access and health infrastructure. Patents and the presence or absence of incremental innovations have nothing to do with it. Look at it another way, if a large number of people across the planet don’t have black and white televisions, should the government stop attempts to develop and produce high-end plasma televisions? It may sound ridiculous, but that analogy holds true for the pharmaceutical industry.”

Read the full The Asian Age article here.

EU announces new ‘single patent’

The Council of the European Union (EU) has announced an agreement on long-awaited plans for a single EU Patent and a new European patent court.  The EU Patent will involve partnerships between European patent offices, which will bring about more rapid delivery of patents and increase speed of access to market for innovative products and services.

The proposed EU Patent will make it less costly for businesses to protect innovative technology and make litigation more accessible and predictable, says the EU Commission.

UN report on patents and innovation

“History has shown… that companies and countries which continue to invest in new products and innovation during times of economic recession will be those that will be best positioned to take advantage of the recovery, when it arrives,” said WIPO Director General Francis Gurry.

Demand for international trademarks and patents dropped last year in the wake of the global economic crisis.  A report by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) points to weaker growth in patent filings in 2008, after a 3.7 per cent increase in 2007.

“What happens in an economic crisis is that there’s an interference in the value chain of intellectual property,” said Gurry.

Thus reduced profits from innovation lead to reduced investment in research and development and reduced applications for patent filings and trademarks.

But the trend is not uniform across countries and the WIPO report points to the growing use by East Asian countries, such as China, as its enterprises and universities become familiar with the international patent system.  China’s State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) office has replaced the EPO as the fourth largest issuer of grants behind offices in Japan, the US, and the Republic of Korea.

Incentives important to stimulate drug development – WHO

Pharmaceutical firms need incentives, including lucrative patents, to keep creating drugs and vaccines against emergent threats such as the H1N1 influenza pandemic, the World Health Organisation’s head said on Tuesday.

“Progress in public health depends on innovation. Some of the greatest strides forward for health have followed the development and introduction of new medicines and vaccines,” said WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said.

Chan, who last month declared a full pandemic underway from the H1N1 virus, said that patents can help ensure that companies develop medicines to “stay ahead of the development of drug resistance” in diseases like malaria and tuberculosis.

“Innovation is needed to keep pace with the emergence of new diseases, including pandemic influenza caused by the new H1N1 virus,” she told a meeting on intellectual property and health, a contentious issue that has divided rich and poor nations.

“R&D can indeed be needs-driven as well as profit driven,” the former Hong Kong health director said. “International agreements that govern the global trading system can indeed be shaped in ways that favour health needs of the poor.”

Chan described the global vaccine making capacity as “finite and woefully inadequate for a world of 6.8 billion people, nearly all of whom are susceptible to infection by this entirely new and highly contagious virus.”

While acknowledging that “the lion’s share of these limited vaccines will go to wealthy countries,” she said the shortfall was “the result of limited global manufacturing capacity. It is not, in essence, a result of intellectual property issues.”

TACD meeting on Patents, Copyright and Knowledge Governance

The Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue recently hosted a meeting in Washington D.C. on Patents, Copyrights and Knowledge Governance.  Panellists were charged with making 2-3 concrete policy recommendations re IP for the incoming Obama administration.  While no consensus was reached, and in fact only a few of the presenters actually provided specific policy recommendations, there were some interesting presentations and discussions.  Some of the points raised include:

• Maintaining an innovation economy is central to America’s long term success.
• Innovation should be high on the government agenda.  There is a need for an advocate for innovation in the Whitehouse. 
• Having a patent system is good, though everyone can agree that it can be improved.
• Implement different IP requirements and protections for different industries (software and IT technologies don’t take 20 years to develop and also become obsolete much faster)
• University generated invention is a huge source of innovation

Other topics raised during the two-day meeting included the need to improve access to affordable and effective medicines in developing countries; the potential benefits and significant challenges a prize system to induce innovation; TRIPS flexibilities and US trade practices; and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.

TACD is a forum of US and EU consumer organisations co-chaired by Jill Johnstone of Consumer Focus and James Love of KEI.