The biggest side-effect of making medicine; How to manage intellectual property and patent law

International intellectual property regulations are doing serious damage to the pharmaceutical industry and, by extension, to the health of people around the world, writes Ralf Boscheck, Lundin Family Professor of Economics and Business Policy at IMD, in this contributed article to The Pharma Letter.

The core of the problem: growing global concern about how to ensure affordable access to medicine without damaging the initiatives that sustain pharmaceutical research. Attempts to address the issues have resulted in significant disagreement between developed and emerging economies about just how much protection should be available to companies that develop new drugs.

Members of the World Intellectual Property Organization, which celebrated its 40th anniversary this year, are trying to resolve their differences on how – and even whether – emerging market countries should move to a framework that offers greater IP protection, but the results to date are not promising. “Access to medicine” advocates propose measures based on national income levels; branded drug producers want a time-based transition schedule; others argue that patent protection should be linked with the UN’s Human Development Index, which is a relative scale with frequently-changing outcomes and policy incomes.