Wrapping up 2023 with some noteworthy medicines, law and policy developments
Welcome to our 2023 end-of-the-year blog, our annual and highly-biased run-through of notable access to medicines events of the year that is about to...
Socially Responsible Licensing of Medical Technologies
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND: On 31 October, the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) held their...
Time for new pharmaceutical-innovation models
The pharmaceutical industry is one of the most profitable on earth, expected to be worth $1.4 trillion by the end of 2020. Last year,...
New WHO-UNITAID briefing paper: Improving Access to Covid-19 Treatments
A new briefing paper based on Medicines Law & Policy research outlines the legal instruments available for countries seeking to access key therapeutics to...
Cancer Drug Pricing on the World Health Organization’s Executive Board Agenda
On Thursday 24 January, the World Health Organization’s 144th Executive Board meeting will kick off in Geneva. One of the agenda items is access...
New reports offer evidence for extending the WTO Decision on TRIPS to Covid-19 therapeutics...
In February 2024, the 13th World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference will take place. WTO Members are expected to decide whether to extend the...
Covid-19 and the comeback of compulsory licensing
The Covid-19 outbreak raises many questions, including some we can answer using experiences gained in previous disease outbreaks. Here is one: how to deal...
Lessons for a pandemic preparedness treaty from previous successes and failures with treaty-based technology...
This post can also be downloaded as a PDF here.
1. Introduction
Scaling-up production of new vaccines to provide many billions of doses on a time-scale...
Pharmaceutical Accountability Foundation is taking AbbVie to court over excessive pricing of Humira –...
On 21 February, the Dutch Pharmaceutical Accountability Foundation (PAF) took the bold step to take AbbVie to court, claiming the company’s pricing policy had...
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...