Blog

The latest thoughts from Medicines Law & Policy partners.

WHO’s Essential Medicines Committee takes aim at rising prices, adds new treatments for cancer...

On 1 October, the World Health Organization published its latest Model List of Essential Medicines (EML) and Essential Medicines for Children (EMLc). Updated roughly...

UN “Pact for the Future” intellectual property actions need revision to ensure innovation and...

UPDATE: From 22-23 September 2024, the Summit of the Future took place and adopted the Pact for the Future. The intellectual property paragraph of...

Ensuring that intellectual property rights aren’t a barrier to scaling-up: the remarkable example of...

This week various international bodies are tackling different challenges in meeting the urgent problem of scaling-up manufacture of and access to vaccines for Covid-19....

Urgent collective action to meet the challenge of this pandemic crisis: a coronavirus related...

The Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, first described the present coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak as a pandemic on the 11th...

Why The Request By Least Developed Countries For An Extension Of The Transitional Period...

On 24 February 2015 Bangladesh on behalf of the 34 Least Developed Country members (LDCs) of the World Trade Organization (WTO) submitted a request...

Thanks to the European Commission, Biogen can extend Tecfidera monopoly for at least two...

According to an investigation by Follow the Money, a Dutch investigative journalism outlet, the European Commission restored the market exclusivity of Tecfidera, a multiple...

WTO Members discuss proposal to suspend certain intellectual property protection during the Covid-19 crisis

An earlier version of this comment was published by The Wire on 13 October 2020. On 2 October, India and South Africa sent a proposal...

Dolutegravir Patent Licences Can Provide Access To All

This year the World Health Organization (WHO) added dolutegravir, an antiretroviral medicine for the treatment of HIV infection, to its Model List of Essential...

Dutch Minister of Health writes open letter to pharma, threatens to name and shame

"Dear Pharma," writes the Dutch Minister of Health, Bruno Bruins in an open letter in the daily newspaper the Volkskrant, "Last week two messages jumped...

Will the European Court of Justice put a stop to the evergreening of Truvada...

Truvada, the fixed-dose combination of tenofovir disoproxil fumarate (TDF) and emtricitabine (FTC) is a critical medicine in both HIV treatment and prevention. It is...