Efforts by governments, firms, and patients to deliver pioneering drugs for critical health needs face a challenge of diminishing efficiency in developing those medicines. While multi-sectoral collaborations involving firms, researchers, patients, and policymakers are widely recognized as crucial for countering this decline, existing incentives to engage in drug development predominantly target drug manufacturers and thereby do little to stimulate collaborative innovation. In this mini review, we consider the unexplored potential within pharmaceutical regulations to create novel incentives to encourage a diverse (...) set of actors from the public and private spheres to engage in the kind of collaborative knowledge exchange requisite for fostering enhanced innovation in early drug development. (shrink)

Patents and free trade make strange bedfellows. For most of their history, patents have been instruments deployed to resist trade with other countries, not to enhance it. Whether one looks at Venetian laws that punished citizens who practiced local crafts outside the city, the Mercantilist uses to which patents were put in Elizabethan England, or the cartels of the 19th and 20th centuries created on a foundation of interlocking patent rights, patents have had a distinctly protectionist function. It is thus (...) ironic that it is intellectual property rights in general, and patents in particular, that have been held up in recent years as the poster child of much that is wrong with globalization and free trade. Nowhere is this more so than in debates concerning international human rights law and patents, in particular the position that patents violate an international right to health. (shrink)