Post by account_disabled on Feb 20, 2024 2:16:49 GMT -6
Discussions now taking place at the World Health Organization seek to reach consensus on a new agreement on the pandemic. The intention is to learn from the mistakes made during Covid-19 to better prepare for the future. Unfortunately, a key intellectual property issue remains unaddressed, threatening to limit the scope of what the agreement can achieve to ensure timely and equitable access to pandemic countermeasures. Pharmaceutical products, such as medications, vaccines, and diagnostics, can be protected by various types of intellectual property, including patents and trade secrets. Although a basic description of how to manufacture a product may exist in published patent documents, manufacturing it at scale often requires access to associated trade secrets developed by the patent owner. This is especially true for complex products such as monoclonal antibodies or mRNA vaccines.
A future pandemic may well require urgent manufacturing of a complex pharmaceutical product on a very large scale, beyond the capacity of the intellectual property owner alone. Consequently, third Job Function Email Database parties would need access to both the patents and the associated trade secrets. The owner could enter into voluntary agreements licensing patents and sharing them with others. However, Covid-19 showed that even during a global emergency, some intellectual property owners were unwilling or unable to do so. Given this, having an alternative mechanism is vital. Patents are public instruments granted by national or regional authorities. During a pandemic, each country can decide for itself how to deal with it.
The current draft agreement includes measures such as mandatory patent licenses or pandemic-related patent exemptions. In contrast, trade secrets, by their very nature, are not disclosed to the public and are likely to be located in a limited set of countries, for example, those in which the product is manufactured. Even during a pandemic, these countries cannot be required to force the sharing of trade secrets. The current draft does not address this issue and is therefore essentially limited to allowing the manufacture of comparatively simple pharmaceutical products, which generally do not require access to information that is not publicly available. To expand its reach, countries should consider an additional measure that could compel the sharing of trade secrets in a pandemic emergency.
A future pandemic may well require urgent manufacturing of a complex pharmaceutical product on a very large scale, beyond the capacity of the intellectual property owner alone. Consequently, third Job Function Email Database parties would need access to both the patents and the associated trade secrets. The owner could enter into voluntary agreements licensing patents and sharing them with others. However, Covid-19 showed that even during a global emergency, some intellectual property owners were unwilling or unable to do so. Given this, having an alternative mechanism is vital. Patents are public instruments granted by national or regional authorities. During a pandemic, each country can decide for itself how to deal with it.
The current draft agreement includes measures such as mandatory patent licenses or pandemic-related patent exemptions. In contrast, trade secrets, by their very nature, are not disclosed to the public and are likely to be located in a limited set of countries, for example, those in which the product is manufactured. Even during a pandemic, these countries cannot be required to force the sharing of trade secrets. The current draft does not address this issue and is therefore essentially limited to allowing the manufacture of comparatively simple pharmaceutical products, which generally do not require access to information that is not publicly available. To expand its reach, countries should consider an additional measure that could compel the sharing of trade secrets in a pandemic emergency.