KEI remarks on accepting the MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions
James Love
Knowledge Ecology International
October 5, 2006
Thank you. Thanks in particular to Elspeth Revere and Kathy Im.
This award recognizes the collective efforts of our very devoted and talented staff and board. The money and the recognition will make it possible for Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), our new corporate entity, to do more.
$1 a day HIV/AIDS drug regimen
In the early 2000s, KEI’s founder, James Love, advocated to lower the price of HIV/AIDS drugs for patients in developing countries. Love convinced generic manufacturer Cipla to sell the standard 3-drug HIV/AIDS regimen for $1 per day, a breakthrough price that saved — and continues to save — millions of lives. Love’s work culminated in the creation of the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria and the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), two of the world’s largest providers of HIV/AIDS treatments.
UNITAID patent pool for medicines
Cost Benefit Analysis for UNITAID Patent Pool
UNITAIDwebsite on patent pools
MSF website on patent pools
Thiru Balasubramaniam is the Geneva Representative of Knowledge Ecology International.
The KEI team has been working on the Access to Medicines movement for more than 20 years, engaging in global public interest advocacy, providing technical and structural support to governments, academics, civil society and firms, organizing meetings, publishing papers, as well as advocating for new thinking and solutions and more transparency in policy making.
KEI has an interest in the general topic of prizes to stimulate innovation, with a special focus on the use of prizes to stimulate medical innovation. The work on medical innovation prizes covers proposals for both high- and lower-income markets, and proposals that target new medical knowledge, as well as product development.
The Center for American Progress hosted a video conference of Dr. Howard Dean talking about Health Care reform on Tueday. The video is on the web here. On this one hour program, Howard Dean spends a little over 3 minutes responding to allegations that he is a “shill” for BIO, on the issue of biosimilars.
The US Department of State “2009 Investment Climate Statement for Switzerland” provides an interesting and often unexpected portrait of the intellectual property landscape for a country that is often a hard-liner in global IPR negotiations. Continue Reading
On June 18, 2009, The Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) issued a 2,000 word resolution on the enforcement of copyright, trademarks, patents and other intellectual property rights. The resolution is on the TACD web page here. A press release from the TACD IP-Working Group, with comments from several TACD members, is available on the web here.
In efforts to introduce the topic of innovation inducement prizes into the discussions about drug development, there are inevitably questions about the relationship between grants and prizes.
In some cases, prizes are being offered as a reform of “pull” mechanisms, and can usefully be compared to the grant of a marketing monopoly, which is the primary pull mechanism used today. In this context, a question is, should drug or vaccine developers be rewarded with monopolies or cash? And if cash, where does the money come from, and how much money is given to a particular project?