New Patents Stance by UK Drugs Company Must Be Turned into Action

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) welcomes Mr. Witty’s recognition that patents act as a barrier to research and development and that patent pools offer new ways to stimulate research into neglected diseases. Promises now need to be turned into action. The terms of any licenses attached to the patent pool will be critical and more detail is needed. Funding sources also need to be identified to develop any products that result from this research. MSF calls on all other pharmaceutical companies to lift patent barriers and make their molecule compounds and processes available to help develop treatments for neglected diseases and open up their compound libraries to researchers. But GSK must extend this thinking to include HIV. Mr. Witty claims that a patent pool is meant to focus on diseases with a severe lack of treatments and that there is sufficient innovation for HIV. He is wrong. In the field of HIV/AIDS treatment, the gap between what is needed and what is available is large. A patent pool can help address that gap and encourage innovation in areas where it’s not happening today. Image: doctorswithoutborders.org. > Continue.

News selected by Covalence | Country: Global | Company: GlaxoSmithKline | Source: Médecins sans Frontières