So Discusses Drug Innovation Crisis at World Trade Organization

Published October 6, 2014, last updated on April 9, 2018 under Research News

The Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM) organized a panel at the World Trade Organization Public Forum last week on new approaches in university management of intellectual property. The panel gathered a diverse panel of experts, including DGHI faculty member Anthony So, who gave their take on possible solutions to less innovation and higher prices of drugs, and the role of publicly-funded research.

So, who directs the Duke Program on Global Health and Technology Access at the Sanford School of Public Policy, said research and development (R&D) productivity in the pharmaceutical sector has been declining, despite growing inputs.

At the same time, he said, prices of new drugs have been “alarmingly” rising. He illustrated the fact by saying that 11 of the 12 cancer drugs approved in 2012 were priced over US$100,000 per patient per year. According to So, among the top 100 drugs in the US, “the median revenue per patient rose from US$1,258 in 2010 to US$9,396 in 2014.”

Publicly-funded research institutions have long been a large contributor to innovative drugs, he said, for example to “virtually all the important innovative vaccines” that have been introduced over the past 25 years.

On the lack of availability of “priority patents,” he said that some years ago the Malaria Vaccine Initiative had a project to pull together key patents to bring a new malaria vaccine to market. The patent landscape for malaria showed 167 patent families, held by 75 different organizations. Although the Initiative narrowed its search to 39 priority patents, by the time the patent landscape was conducted, nearly half of those priority patents were no longer available for licensing, he said. Many of these patents, he added, were originally held by publicly-funded research organizations.

De-linking the cost of R&D and the price of health products is a key concept, said So. Ways of making de-linkage possible include pull mechanisms, such as advance purchase commitments and prizes. Push mechanisms, such as research grants, might also be used so that universities play a strategic role in de-linkage, he said.

During the Q&A session, So remarked that universities sometimes hold fast to their IP “as the last piece of gold” due to the “lottery ticket” effect created by the current innovation system. Some 30 years after the Bayh-Dole Act, he said, less than 5 percent of research revenue comes from licensing revenues in the United States, he said.

See the full story posted by Intellectual Property Watch, a non-profit independent news service.