Center for Global Health R&D Policy Assessment

In The Gridlock Economy, Columbia Law School professor Michael Heller explains how too much ownership wrecks markets, stops innovation, and costs lives. Ownership itself isn’t the problem, he writes; it’s that today’s increasingly complex economies get stuck in yesterday’s property rights management. Perhaps nowhere else is ‘gridlock’ more costly than in global health, and policy options to remove or prevent gridlock in global health were the subject of last week’s R4D webinar, which provided a first look at R4D’s analysis on joint IP management approaches for global health R&D.

Some attendees of the webinar included Melinda Moree from Bio Ventures for Global Health (BVGH); Jon Pender from GlaxoSmithKline; Suerie Moon, advisor to the Medicines Patent Pool; Krista Cox from KEI; Tahir Amin, co-founder and director of intellectual property for the Initiative for new Medicines, Access & Knowledge. Each of these organizations and individuals is playing a key role in bringing new IP management approaches to global health research through advocacy, facilitation and direct IP contributions.

Other industries have found ways to thwart gridlock. With almost no exceptions, iTunes, Spotify, Pandora and other streaming or music downloading services don’t have licensing deals with individual artists and songwriters to compensate them for generating revenue with their work. It would be prohibitively complex and costly to manage all those legal and financial relationships, leaving word-of-mouth and self-distribution as the only channels for artists to gain exposure and sales of their work.

To facilitate creation and distribution, music streaming or downloading sites as well as radio broadcasters have agreements with intellectual property collectives like ASCAP or BMI, with whom artists have agreements to license their work to others. Distributors pay a fee to the collective, and the collective pays the artists. It’s an example of joint intellectual property (IP) management, and though the barriers and applications of joint-IP vary, it’s a tool that is now emerging elsewhere, including global health.

The Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) was one form of joint IP management that participants discussed at last week’s R4D webinar. As Suerie Moon mentioned during the webinar, the MPP is in formal negotiations with seven of ten targeted companies holding key patents for anti-retrovirals (ARVs). Gilead made a splash this past summer with a major commitment to MPP to put several important compounds in the pool but not without a few strings attached, including limitations on where the drugs must be manufactured.

Just as joint intellectual property management supports radio broadcasts free of charge to listeners and streaming or downloading websites free or very low-cost per song to music fans of every income level, the MPP hopes that by negotiating better licensing terms in the name of public health, and creating a one-stop shop for IP, it can do the same for ARV distribution, and access, while easing the constraints to innovation that would make a difference in the developing world (new formulations, especially for children).

The Pool for Open Innovation Against Neglected Tropical Diseases (POI) is another emerging instance of joint IP management in global health. In the case of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), IP barriers aren’t an issue as much as the need for funding. Unlike HIV/AIDS, NTDs aren’t a large enough market globally to attract the same level of forward-looking research and development resources. The POI hopes that centralizing shared IP, including production know-how, research data, and even research facilities will foster collaboration among researchers and product developers to create knowledge that can drive the development of NTD medicines.

From BVGH, which administers the POI, CEO Melinda Moree said at the webinar that they’re aware of scale being an issue—that to be effective the pool needs more contributors to sign on.

Whether targeting downstream manufacturers in the case of the MPP, or upstream innovators in the case of POI, these are just two examples of emerging joint intellectual property management tools for global health. R4D’s Center for Global Health R&D Policy Assessment is drafting an assessment of how intellectual property management tools can improve access and encourage innovation in the sector. It’s still early days for these new mechanisms, so the jury is still out on their ultimate impact – and stakeholders from the global south should be part of that jury, something Tahir Amin was keen to bring up during last week’s webinar.

If you missed a chance to comment directly to the assessment authors at the webinar, they would still love to hear from you (open comments end September 23rd).