Private Patents and Public Health

Private Patents and Public Health PDF Author: Ellen F. M. 't Hoen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789079700851
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
Millions of people around the world do not have access to the medicines they need to treat disease or alleviate suffering. Strict patent regimes introduced following the establishment of the World Trade Organization in 1995 interfere with widespread access to medicines by creating monopolies that keep medicines prices well out of reach for many. 0The AIDS crisis in the late nineties brought access to medicines challenges to the public?s attention, when millions of people in developing countries died from an illness for which medicines existed, but were not available or affordable. Faced with an unprecedented health crisis ? 8,000 people dying daily ? the public health community launched an unprecedented global effort that eventually resulted in the large-scale availability of low-priced generic HIV medicines. 0But now, high prices of new medicines - for example, for cancer, tuberculosis and hepatitis C - are limiting access to treatment in low-, middle and high-income countries alike. Patent-based monopolies affect almost all medicines developed since 1995 in most countries, and global health policy is now at a critical juncture if the world is to avoid new access to medicines crises. 0This book discusses lessons learned from the HIV/AIDS crisis, and asks whether actions taken to extend access and save lives are exclusive to HIV or can be applied more broadly to new global access challenges.

Private Patents and Public Health

Private Patents and Public Health PDF Author: Ellen F. M. 't Hoen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789079700851
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 181

Get Book Here

Book Description
Millions of people around the world do not have access to the medicines they need to treat disease or alleviate suffering. Strict patent regimes introduced following the establishment of the World Trade Organization in 1995 interfere with widespread access to medicines by creating monopolies that keep medicines prices well out of reach for many. 0The AIDS crisis in the late nineties brought access to medicines challenges to the public?s attention, when millions of people in developing countries died from an illness for which medicines existed, but were not available or affordable. Faced with an unprecedented health crisis ? 8,000 people dying daily ? the public health community launched an unprecedented global effort that eventually resulted in the large-scale availability of low-priced generic HIV medicines. 0But now, high prices of new medicines - for example, for cancer, tuberculosis and hepatitis C - are limiting access to treatment in low-, middle and high-income countries alike. Patent-based monopolies affect almost all medicines developed since 1995 in most countries, and global health policy is now at a critical juncture if the world is to avoid new access to medicines crises. 0This book discusses lessons learned from the HIV/AIDS crisis, and asks whether actions taken to extend access and save lives are exclusive to HIV or can be applied more broadly to new global access challenges.

Justifying Intellectual Property

Justifying Intellectual Property PDF Author: Robert P. Merges
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674049489
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
In a sophisticated defense of intellectual property, Merges draws on Kant, Locke, and Rawls to explain how IP rights are based on a solid ethical foundation and make sense for a just society. He also calls for appropriate boundaries: IP rights are real, but they come with real limits.

The Global Politics of Pharmaceutical Monopoly Power

The Global Politics of Pharmaceutical Monopoly Power PDF Author: Ellen F. M. 't Hoen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789079700066
Category : Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
In The Global Politics of Pharmaceutical Monopoly Power, researcher and global advocate Ellen 't Hoen explains how new global rules for pharmaceutical patenting impact access to medicines in the developing world. The book gives an account of the current debates on intellectual property, access to medicines, and medical innovation, and provides historical context that explains how the current system emerged. This book supports major policy changes in the management of pharmaceutical patents and the way medical innovation is financed in order to protect public health and, in particular, promote access to essential medicines for all. The Open Society Institute provided support to translate this report into Russian.

Drug Wars

Drug Wars PDF Author: Robin Feldman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 131673949X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
While the shockingly high prices of prescription drugs continue to dominate the news, the strategies used by pharmaceutical companies to prevent generic competition are poorly understood, even by the lawmakers responsible for regulating them. In this groundbreaking work, Robin Feldman and Evan Frondorf illuminate the inner workings of the pharmaceutical market and show how drug companies twist health policy to achieve goals contrary to the public interest. In highly engaging prose, they offer specific examples of how generic competition has been stifled for years, with costs climbing into the billions and everyday consumers paying the price. Drug Wars is a guide to the current landscape, a roadmap for reform, and a warning of what is to come. It should be read by policymakers, academics, patients, and anyone else concerned with the soaring costs of prescription drugs.

Making Medicines Affordable

Making Medicines Affordable PDF Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309468086
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Thanks to remarkable advances in modern health care attributable to science, engineering, and medicine, it is now possible to cure or manage illnesses that were long deemed untreatable. At the same time, however, the United States is facing the vexing challenge of a seemingly uncontrolled rise in the cost of health care. Total medical expenditures are rapidly approaching 20 percent of the gross domestic product and are crowding out other priorities of national importance. The use of increasingly expensive prescription drugs is a significant part of this problem, making the cost of biopharmaceuticals a serious national concern with broad political implications. Especially with the highly visible and very large price increases for prescription drugs that have occurred in recent years, finding a way to make prescription medicinesâ€"and health care at largeâ€"more affordable for everyone has become a socioeconomic imperative. Affordability is a complex function of factors, including not just the prices of the drugs themselves, but also the details of an individual's insurance coverage and the number of medical conditions that an individual or family confronts. Therefore, any solution to the affordability issue will require considering all of these factors together. The current high and increasing costs of prescription drugsâ€"coupled with the broader trends in overall health care costsâ€"is unsustainable to society as a whole. Making Medicines Affordable examines patient access to affordable and effective therapies, with emphasis on drug pricing, inflation in the cost of drugs, and insurance design. This report explores structural and policy factors influencing drug pricing, drug access programs, the emerging role of comparative effectiveness assessments in payment policies, changing finances of medical practice with regard to drug costs and reimbursement, and measures to prevent drug shortages and foster continued innovation in drug development. It makes recommendations for policy actions that could address drug price trends, improve patient access to affordable and effective treatments, and encourage innovations that address significant needs in health care.

Pills for the Poorest

Pills for the Poorest PDF Author: E. Cloatre
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137313277
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
The desperate need for a vast part of the global population to access better medicines in more certain ways is one of the biggest concerns of the modern era. Pills for the Poorest offers a new perspective on the much-debated issue of the links between intellectual property and access to medication. Using ethnographic case studies in Djibouti and Ghana, and insights from actor-network theory, it explores the ways in which TRIPs and pharmaceutical patents are translated in the daily practices of those who purchase, distribute, and use (or fail to use) medicines in sub-Saharan Africa. It suggests that focusing on routine practices and the material deployment of intellectual property significantly enriches our understanding of the complex dynamics that animate the field of access to medicines and helps relocate the role of law within those processes. It demonstrates how intellectual property affects access to medicines in ways that are often discreet, indirect and forgotten. By exploring these complex mechanisms, it seeks to ask questions about the modes of actions of pharmaceutical patents, but also, more generally, about the complexity of legal objects.

Jungle Laboratories

Jungle Laboratories PDF Author: Gabriela Soto Laveaga
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822391961
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
In the 1940s chemists discovered that barbasco, a wild yam indigenous to Mexico, could be used to mass-produce synthetic steroid hormones. Barbasco spurred the development of new drugs, including cortisone and the first viable oral contraceptives, and positioned Mexico as a major player in the global pharmaceutical industry. Yet few people today are aware of Mexico’s role in achieving these advances in modern medicine. In Jungle Laboratories, Gabriela Soto Laveaga reconstructs the story of how rural yam pickers, international pharmaceutical companies, and the Mexican state collaborated and collided over the barbasco. By so doing, she sheds important light on a crucial period in Mexican history and challenges us to reconsider who can produce science. Soto Laveaga traces the political, economic, and scientific development of the global barbasco industry from its emergence in the 1940s, through its appropriation by a populist Mexican state in 1970, to its obsolescence in the mid-1990s. She focuses primarily on the rural southern region of Tuxtepec, Oaxaca, where the yam grew most freely and where scientists relied on local, indigenous knowledge to cultivate and harvest the plant. Rural Mexicans, at first unaware of the pharmaceutical and financial value of barbasco, later acquired and deployed scientific knowledge to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies, lobby the Mexican government, and ultimately transform how urban Mexicans perceived them. By illuminating how the yam made its way from the jungles of Mexico, to domestic and foreign scientific laboratories where it was transformed into pills, to the medicine cabinets of millions of women across the globe, Jungle Laboratories urges us to recognize the ways that Mexican peasants attained social and political legitimacy in the twentieth century, and positions Latin America as a major producer of scientific knowledge.

Patent Games in the Global South

Patent Games in the Global South PDF Author: Amaka Vanni
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1509927409
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
In this thought-provoking analysis, the author takes three examples of emerging markets (Brazil, India, and Nigeria) and tells their stories of pharmaceutical patent law-making. Adopting historiographical and socio-legal approaches, focus is drawn to the role of history, social networks and how relationships between a variety of actors shape the framing of, and subsequently the responses to, national implementation of international patent law. In doing so, the book reveals why the experience of Nigeria – a country active in opposing the inclusion of IP to the WTO framework during the Uruguay Rounds – is so different from that of Brazil and India. This book makes an original and useful contribution to the further understanding of how both states and non-state actors conceptualise, establish and interpret pharmaceutical patents law, and its domestic implications on medicines access, public health and development. Patent Games in the Global South was awarded the 2018 SIEL–Hart Prize in International Economic Law.

The Cambridge Handbook of Public-Private Partnerships, Intellectual Property Governance, and Sustainable Development

The Cambridge Handbook of Public-Private Partnerships, Intellectual Property Governance, and Sustainable Development PDF Author: Margaret Chon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316811999
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 811

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Book Description
Public–private partnerships (PPPs) play an increasingly prominent role in addressing global development challenges. United Nations agencies and other organizations are relying on PPPs to improve global health, facilitate access to scientific information, and encourage the diffusion of climate change technologies. For this reason, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development highlights their centrality in the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). At the same time, the intellectual property dimensions and implications of these efforts remain under-examined. Through selective case studies, this illuminating work contributes to a better understanding of the relationships between PPPs and intellectual property considered within a global knowledge governance framework, that includes innovation, capacity-building, technological learning, and diffusion. Linking global governance of knowledge via intellectual property to the SDGs, this is the first book to chart the activities of PPPs at this important nexus.

The Role of NIH in Drug Development Innovation and Its Impact on Patient Access

The Role of NIH in Drug Development Innovation and Its Impact on Patient Access PDF Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309498511
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 103

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Book Description
To explore the role of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in innovative drug development and its impact on patient access, the Board on Health Care Services and the Board on Health Sciences Policy of the National Academies jointly hosted a public workshop on July 24â€"25, 2019, in Washington, DC. Workshop speakers and participants discussed the ways in which federal investments in biomedical research are translated into innovative therapies and considered approaches to ensure that the public has affordable access to the resulting new drugs. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.