April 28, 2008
Contact: Ethan Guillen, Universities Allied for Essential Medicines
ethan.guillen@essentialmedicine.org

Eminent Academics: IGWG Delegates Should Explore New Mechanisms to Correct Current Deficiencies in Medicine System

Today eminent academics including Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Sir John Sulston and Dr. Jim Kim of Partners in Health and Harvard University called on World Health Organization delegates to the Intergovernmental Working Group on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property to consider innovative mechanisms to correct current deficiencies in the access and innovation system.

Speaking of proposals currently under discussion at the IGWG in a joint statement titled, “Making Innovation and Tech Transfer Work for Global Health: The University’s Role and Responsibility to Society,” the signatories wrote:

“These proposals include a treaty on bio-medical R&D and new incentive mechanisms for R&D that would use prizes as incentives for research (including both voluntary open licensing or non-voluntary mechanisms). These ideas, while varied and plausibly contestable in their details, all fall well within the types of solutions that are the result of significant research on the economics of innovation and access.”

The statement also calls on delegates to the IGWG negotiation to consider new solutions to current deficiencies in the drug development and access system stating, “[W]e encourage the Intergovernmental Working Group to support the exploration of new and innovative mechanisms that seek to correct the deficiencies of the current system.”

Universities Allied for Essential Medicines joins in this call and in particular would urge consideration of the Barbados and Bolivian proposals on prize funds and the R&D treaty.

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The full statement and list of signatories is below.

Making Innovation and Tech Transfer Work for Global Health:
The University’s Role and Responsibility to Society

April 28, 2008

This week, a working group of the World Health Organization is meeting to discuss innovative institutional approaches to address the lack of research funding for diseases that disproportionately affect the global poor.

The proposals before the WHO’s Intergovernmental Working Group on Public Health, Innovation, and Intellectual Property include innovations meant to draw investment that will serve the needs of populations too poor or too small to provide sufficient market pull and to overcome the systematic problems of above-marginal cost pricing inherent in patent-based innovation. These proposals include a treaty on bio-medical R&D and new incentive mechanisms for R&D that would use prizes as incentives for research (including both voluntary open licensing or non-voluntary mechanisms[1]). These ideas, while varied and plausibly contestable in their details, all fall well within the types of solutions that are the result of significant research on the economics of innovation and access.[2]

Despite the obvious necessity for greater investment in research to serve the needs of the global poor, and the substantial academic backing for the types of solutions placed before the WHO, the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) initially asked its members, in an April 16, 2008 memorandum, to add their support to a letter – reflecting the position of the pharmaceutical industry – that resists these institutional innovations. “Prize systems,” the initial AUTM memorandum stated, “a medical R&D treaty, and compulsory patent pools are being advocated as alternatives to patents and IP protections at the April 28 meeting. These solutions could pose a challenge to our current and very successful system of innovation and tech transfer.”

Following a campaign in opposition to this proceeding, the president of AUTM apologized that the organization had appeared to endorse the letter and reaffirmed the organization’s support for a “broad array” of strategies “that serve the global public good and ensure access alongside innovation.” While the ultimate outcome was satisfactory, the initial miscommunication raised doubts about where the American scientific community stood in advance of the crucial meeting at the WHO. The event is a symptom of a larger problem at universities: Our positions on questions of research, global development, and technology transfer have never been set in an open, community wide debate. As a result, universities lack a coherent approach aimed at addressing research on neglected diseases and access to essential medicines for the global poor, an absence that is at odds with our core mission of disseminating knowledge for the public good.

This situation must change. Basic questions of scientific research, university technology transfer, and their relation to access to knowledge and development should properly be addressed by the governing bodies and faculties of the universities. Technology transfer offices have a constructive role to play in implementing policy set by scientists and other scholars. But AUTM should not be speaking in the name of the university community as a whole.

We therefore urge our universities to begin a new, open process for setting policies regarding the funding and licensing of basic science: These policies must be set by the academic faculties, in particular the scientists whose research is at stake and social scientists and others who study innovation and development. These processes should be conducted in open forums with opportunity for input from patient advocates, students, and the broader public. This will ensure that the policies serve the public good
and reflect the values of the university community.

Furthermore, we encourage the Intergovernmental Working Group to support the exploration of new and innovative mechanisms that seek to correct the deficiencies of the current system.

Universities have a social compact with society. As educational and research institutions, it is our responsibility to generate and transmit knowledge, both to our students and the public. We have a specific and central role in helping to promote innovation in many fields and to manage the deployment of our innovations for the public benefit. In no field are the moral imperatives to do so as clear as they are in medicine. It is high time that we discussed this moral imperative as the open, deliberative communities that we believe ourselves to be.

[1] Of the five member country proposals on prizes to stimulate R&D, four that address the unmet global R&D needs would rely on voluntary open licensing to promote access. A fifth involving cancer drugs in developing countries, would involve non-voluntary licenses to use patents, in return for prize type rewards.

[2] See, e.g., Michael Kremer, Pharmaceuticals and the Developing World, The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Autumn, 2002), pp. 67-90; Steven Shavell & Tanguy van Ypersele, Rewards versus Intellectual Property Rights, Journal of Law and Economics, Volume 44, Number 2, October 2001, 525-547; William Jack and Jean O. Lanjouw Financing Pharmaceutical Innovation: How Much Should Poor Countries Contribute? The World Bank Economic Review 2005 19(1):45-67; Michele Boldrin & David K. Levine, Against Intellectual Monopoly, Cambridge University Press 2008; Joseph Stiglitz, Prizes Not Patents, at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stiglitz81; Aidan Hollis, An Efficient Reward System for Pharmaceutical Innovation, at www.who.int/intellectualproperty/news/en/Submission-Hollis.pdf.

Initial Signatories

Joseph Stiglitz
Nobel Laureate in Economics
University Professor, Columbia University

Sir John Sulston
Nobel Laureate in Medicine
Professor of Life Sciences, University of
Manchester

Yochai Benkler
Berkman Professor for Entrepreneurial
Legal Studies, Harvard University

Jim Yong Kim
Professor of Social Medicine
Harvard University

William W. Fisher III
Hale and Dorr Professor of Intellectual
Property Law, Harvard University

Richard Nelson
Henry R. Luce Professor of International
Political Economy, Columbia University

Anthony So
Director of the Program in Global Health
and Technology Access, Duke University

Paul Davis
Director
U.S. Government Relations, Health GAP

Kevin Outterson
Director of the Health Law Program
Boston University School of Law

Ian Shapiro
Sterling Professor of Political Science
Yale University

Amy Kapczynski
Assistant Professor of Law, University of
California, Berkeley, School of Law

Kaveh Khoshnood
Assistant Professor in Public Health Practice
Yale University

Thomas Pogge
Professor of Philosophy
Yale University

Matthew Rimmer
Senior Lecturer
ANU College of Law

Tom Kalil
Special Assistant to the Chancellor for Science and Technology
UC Berkeley

Aidan Hollis
Associate Professor of Economics
University of Calgary

Marianne Bronner-Fraser
Ruddock Professor of Biology
Caltech

John Harris
Lord Alliance Professor of Bioethics
University of Manchester

David Hoos Assistant Professor of Clinical Epidemiology
Columbia University

Dean Baker
Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research

Josh Ruxin Assistant Clinical Professor of Public Health
Columbia University

Peter Drahos
Professor
Australian National University

Arti K. Rai
Professor of Law
Duke Law School

Robert Cook-Deegan
Director, Center for Genome Ethics, Law & Policy
Duke University

Brook K. Baker Health GAP
Professor, Northeastern University School of Law

Alan Berkman Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Sociomedical Sciences
Columbia University

Jennifer Hirsch
Associate Professor of Public Health
Columbia University

Bhaven N. Sampat
Assistant Professor of Public Health
Columbia University

James Boyle
William Neil Reynolds Professor of Law
Duke Law School

Susan Crawford
Professor
University of Michigan School of Law

Karen Brudney
Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine
Columbia University College of P&S

Lauren Biron
Research Scholar
University of Cambridge

Carol Mimura
Assistant Vice Chancellor for Intellectual Property
University of California, Berkeley

Prithi Radakrishnan
Director, Initiative for Medicines
Access & Knowledge

Syed Ziaur Rahman
Associate Professor of Pharmacology
Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College

Anne-Emanuelle Birn
Associate Professor of Public Health
University of Toronto

Jack M. Balkin
Director of the Information Society Project
Yale Law School

Solly Benatar
Professor in Public Health Sciences
University of Toronto

J. Andrew McCammon
Joseph E. Mayer of Theoretical Chemistry
University of California, San Diego

Madhavi Sunder
Professor
University of California, Davis
School of Law

Joel Lexchin
Professor of Health Policy and Management
York University