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Which patent and where? Why international patent transparency by companies is needed for medicines

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A common method for determining the patent status of medicines internationally is highly imprecise and complicates medicine access by obscuring the true medicine patent landscape for policymakers and procurement officers.

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Figure 1: ROC plot tests of the linkage methodology's accuracy with databases and products combined or disaggregated.

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Acknowledgements

We are thankful for useful comments during the development of this paper from colleagues at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and at the United Nations Secretary General's High-level Panel on Access to Medicines, from Warren A. Kaplan (Boston University) and Stephen Hoffman (University of Ottawa). R.F.B.'s doctoral studies have been funded through a Vanier Doctoral Scholarship by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) of the Government of Canada. No specific funding was received for this particular work; however, the original report, upon which the data for this article is based, was commissioned by WIPO. The authors declare that each of their roles in the development of this manuscript satisfies the ICMJE criteria for authorship.

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  1. Reed F. Beall and Amir Attaran are in the Population Health Program, Faculties of Law and of Medicine, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.,

    Reed F Beall & Amir Attaran

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Correspondence to Reed F Beall.

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Beall, R., Attaran, A. Which patent and where? Why international patent transparency by companies is needed for medicines. Nat Biotechnol 34, 923–926 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.3664

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