Public Health Management : The Way Forward through Patent Pools

Abstract

Patent pools covers agreements whereby two or more parties agree to pool their respective technologies and license them as a package. It facilitates public health management of IP through a partnership between an entity with a public health mandate on one hand and private pharmaceutical companies on the other hand. This model of access-oriented and nonexclusive voluntary licensing mechanisms with a clear public health mandate can contribute to achieving this goal of Universal Health coverage and can overcome a number of access and innovation challenges in the biopharmaceutical field. This can be substantiated by analyzing the successful Medicines Patent pool. The benefits of collaborative research and an efficient patent pool could also be witnessed when COVID-19 pandemic was declared as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the World Health Organization (WHO) on January 30, 2020, where they launched the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (CTAP) with a Solidarity Call to Action for sharing intellectual property on treatments and vaccines.