The Italian Exception – A personalised approach to accessing high-priced patented medicines
At the end of March 2017, the Italian Minister of Health Beatrice Lorenzin has authorised the importation of generic medicines. She did this with...
Dutch Court Orders AstraZeneca to Pay Damages in Patent Evergreening Case
Today the Dutch court made a long-awaited ruling in the patent evergreening case of health insurance company Menzis versus AstraZeneca. It found that AstraZeneca...
How patents, data exclusivity and SPCs interact to extend market exclusivity of medicines: the...
Patents usually confer 20-year exclusive rights on inventions. Data exclusivity laws confer, depending on the country, 5 to 10 years’ exclusive rights over safety...
Imagine if health and trade ministers would meet in one room this week
A earlier version of this commentary was published on 28 November 2021 by Barron's.
This is a time of missed opportunities. This week, trade ministers...
“This week, the medicines were not there”: What is at stake in the pandemic...
Earlier this week I listened to a testimony from a community worker at a maternity ward where HIV-positive women gave birth. 17 babies were...
Medicines Law & Policy Intervention at the WHO Pandemic Accord Negotiations
This statement was delivered on 19 February at the World Health Organization in Geneva, on the occasion of the 8th Intergovernmental Negotiating Body to...
The Most Common Misunderstanding about Compulsory Licensing
The belief that a country can only use compulsory licensing in cases of public health emergencies is a myth that has proven difficult to...
The Role of Activism in Shaping Law and Policies that Support Access to Medicines
This article is also available as a PDF here.
Almost 26 years ago, here in Amsterdam, on November 25-26, 1999, Health Action International, Médecins Sans...
How not to solve a crisis: The European Commission’s Plan for Transferable Data Exclusivity...
Drug-resistant infections, sometimes called “superbugs,” killed an estimated 1.27 million people in 2019, a number set to rise to 50 million by 2050. It is...
Dutch health insurance company Menzis takes AstraZeneca to court over patent evergreening
Today health insurance company Menzis announced that it is taking the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca to court over the pricing of Seroquel, a medicine...