Author: James Love

KEI is holding a December 2, 2016 meeting on the delinkage of R&D costs from drug prices.

The venue will be US Senate Hearing Room SD-106, Dirksen Office Building. The meeting will take place from 9:00am to 2:00pm.

A copy of the agenda is available here.

For more information about delinkage, see: http://delinkage.org.

To register for the event, please fill out this form: https://goo.gl/forms/AbP2npqLRLYneLjk1.
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KEI is interested in how regimes proposed in the IGC impact the economics of stewardship, curation and sharing of Traditional Knowledge (TK) and Genetic Resources (GR).

KEI generally opposes the creation of exclusive rights that can block innovations and access to knowledge and materials, in the context of Traditional Knowledge or Generic Resources.

However, benefit sharing does not require the granting of exclusive rights. Liability rule approaches seem to offer a better model.

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USPTO has just published its new estimates of “IP-intensive” jobs for the US economy. The report is titled: Intellectual Property and the U.S. Economy: 2016 Update, and is available as a PDF file here. USPTO press release here:

I took a quick look at the report, and below are some initial bullet points:

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I wanted to post a brief note about three separate mechanism to overcome patent monopolies in current US law. All are useful, in the right context, and all have some limits.

1. The Bayh-Dole March-In rights under 35 U.S.C. 203, as defined by 35 U.S.C. 201(f).

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as PDF.

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David Hirschmann, US Chamber, claims efforts to curb high prices for cancer drugs are “a destructive course.”

The US Chamber of Commerce might consider renaming itself the US/Swiss Chamber of Commerce, after their most recent attack on the Colombia Minister of Health (MoH) announcement that a “Declaration of Public Interest” would be issued for the patents on the cancer drug imatinib, held by the Swiss company Novartis. In the US Chamber’s defense of the Swiss drug company, they don’t mention the fact that Novartis has earned about $48 billion from sales of imatinib (sold by Novartis under the brand names Gleevec or Glivec) since the drug was put on the market, including more than $380 million per month in 2015. Continue Reading →

Alfred Engelberg and Aaron Kesselheim have published an opinion article in Nature titled:

“Use the Bayh-Dole Act to lower drug prices for government healthcare programs,” Nature Medicine 22, 576 (2016) doi:10.1038/nm0616-576, Published online 07 June 2016.
http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v22/n6/abs/nm0616-576.html

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