Innovation, Intellectual Property, and Global Health

Abstract

This chapter sets out to critically examine the current system to incentivize biomedical research and development (R&D) and some key alternative ideas. The current market-based system medical innovation, based on intellectual property rights, played a crucial role in generating the new, innovative vaccines and drugs that have dramatically improved global health outcomes over a relatively short period, starting from the mid-twentieth century. This system, however, suffers from major flaws in that the innovative drugs and vaccines are not affordable to many living in poorer countries and, with ever-increasing drug prices, even to some in richer countries. Further, intellectual property, being a market-based system, does not provide a solution for disease areas where the patient population lacks adequate purchasing power – such as neglected tropical diseases – or where the markets are too small to be of interest to commercial entities, such as in the case of new medicines to tackle antimicrobial resistance. Alternative ideas that aim to incentivize the needed biomedical R&D, and to delink price from R&D costs, include prize funds, advance market commitments, and specific product development collaborations. It is clear that, given the urgency to improve global health outcomes, all stakeholders need to cooperate to find win-win workable solutions that would result in low-cost, affordable, socially optimal, and essential vaccines and drugs.