February 2, 2010
Intellectual property (IP) is prized in research and development. It is the only way to legally protect your ideas and investments, and it serves as an incentive that inspires innovation and promotes scientific progress—you come up with a novel, valuable idea and you earn the rights to it. The IP system was devised for products that have commercial value, which means that sometimes it doesn’t work as well for products with high social value but little or no commercial value. This has been the subject of much ideological debate but little pragmatic action.
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BIO Ventures for Global Health Chosen to Administer the GSK and Alnylam Intellectual Property Pool
Washington, D.C. – January 20, 2010 – BIO Ventures for Global Health, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), and Alnylam announced today that the organizations are partnering to engage the global health community in using the powerful resources of the GSK and Alnylam Intellectual Property (IP) Pool. The IP Pool was formed in February 2009 to aid in the discovery and development of new medicines for the treatment of 16 neglected tropical diseases, as defined by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, in the world’s least developed countries. By adopting a more accessible approach to intellectual property, the pool facilitates access to compounds and technologies and, most importantly, industrial know-how for organizations that want to conduct research on treatments for these neglected diseases.
“New medicines for diseases that primarily affect the poor in developing countries have been slow in coming because although the market is large in numbers, most of the people affected and their governments cannot afford to pay even moderate prices. This means that much of the development of new medicines is taking place in innovative non-profits and academic research centers,” says Melinda Moree, Chief Executive Officer of BIO Ventures for Global Health, an independent, non-profit organization. “For many of these academic and global health non-profit groups, however, intellectual property can be perceived as preventing rather than enabling their work. I am excited to use this new role to help those working on developing products for neglected diseases speed up their efforts by accessing the patents, technologies, and product development expertise available in the IP Pool.”
The full press release can be read here.
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