Pharmaceutical Patent Pool: A Solution to Innovation and Consumers’ Access?

Ms Chonticha Sae Lim

Abstract

The protection of intellectual property rights has been established to provide incentives that facilitate the disclosure of scientific knowledge. The pursuit of patenting may, however, encourage covertness, intensify rivalry and reduce cooperation among parties rather than the sharing of knowledge.

In recent years there are growing concerns that in the field of patent protection ‘the pendulum has swung too far in favor of patent holders, resulting in an inefficient market for technology’. The use of the current patent system seems to have created fragmented patents and patent thickets that, through increased transaction costs, lead to blockage throughout the system and ‘there is a growing consensus that something needs to be done to minimize technology blocking’. In response to the drawbacks resulting from the current system, an alternative institution has been sought for and a collecting rights management system such as ‘patent pools’ has been established as a mechanism to re-aggregate the fragmented rights and reduce transaction costs.
In the field of biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, the strengthening of patent protection has raised two major concerns. First, the growth of patent activities at the upstream level such as patents on gene sequence could block the whole line of R&D and downstream product improvements. Second, the introduction of pharmaceutical patents in developing countries can deprive people in these countries from the access to their life-saving drugs such as the anti-retroviral drugs for HIV/AIDS.

A collective rights management system like patent pools, which have been successfully used in telecommunications and electronics industries, have been advocated as a solution to the problem of blocking patents and patent thickets for pharmaceutical R&D and the problem of access to pharmaceutical products in developing countries. The objective of this paper is to assess the problem of blocking patents and patent thicket in biopharmaceutical industry and illustrates how a pharmaceutical patent pool can be used to address both the problem of patents on innovation and access.

Conference Paper