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.

But sometimes, individuals and companies decide to act to share intellectual property for the public good. At BIO Ventures for Global Health, we believe in the power of intellectual property and what it can do to accelerate innovation in general, and also for global health. That’s why we recently announced that we are partnering with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), and Alnylam to engage the global health community in using the powerful resources of the GSK and Alnylam Knowledge Pool. The Knowledge 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.

The primary objective of the Knowledge Pool is to help those innovative non-profits and academic research centers working on developing products for neglected diseases to speed up their efforts by accessing the patents, technologies, and product development expertise available in the Knowledge Pool. For many of these academic and global health non-profit groups, however, intellectual property can be perceived as preventing rather than enabling their work. At BIO Ventures for Global Health, we are committed to using our new role as administrator of the Knowledge Pool to closing this cultural gap and ensuring maximum utility of the Pool’s resources and expertise to benefit the public good.

To carry out this role, we are organizing disease-specific meetings that identify the gaps in expertise and intellectual property that currently exist in product development for neglected diseases. We will help global health researchers work with the resources of the Knowledge Pool to fill these gaps so that the resources generously made available by companies will be used to create medicines for neglected diseases faster and more efficiently. We are excited to accelerate the use of this important resource so that industry and global health researchers can work together toward the critical common goal of saving millions of lives in poor countries.

Read the BIO Ventures for Global Health press release here.