Why you can't get the lifesaving drugs you need | Ellen 't Hoen | TEDxZurich
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 26 พ.ย. 2012
- Access to medicines patents can be a question of life and death in the developing world. Global discussions have centred on how to prevent the "tragedy of the anti-commons," in which use of important drugs is off-limits due to the intellectual property rights while also preserving incentives to innovate. The Medicines Patent Pool is an initiative that goes beyond the discussion clearing away medicines patent barriers to increase access to new, affordable HIV treatment in developing countries.
Ellen 't Hoen is an independent medicines law and policy consultant. She has particular expertise in the area of access to medicines and intellectual property. Her most recent achievement is the establishment of the Medicines Patent Pool to accelerate the availability of low cost HIV treatments in developing countries through patent licensing. In 1981 she co-founded DES Action the Netherlands and remained its coordinator until 1990. In 1990 she joined Health Action International to head the policy and campaigns unit. From 1996 until 1999 she was the international coordinator of the independent medicines journal La Revue Prescrire/Prescrire International and the International Society of Drug Bulletins (ISDB). From 1999 until 2009 she was the Director of Policy and Advocacy at Médecins sans Frontières' (MSF) Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines. In 2009 she became the Senior Adviser for Intellectual Property and Medicines Patent Pool at WHO/UNITAID where she set up the Medicines Patent Pool which aims at brokering and making available patent licenses to antiretroviral medicines with the purpose of increasing access to low-cost and better adapted ARVs, for example pediatric formulations or fixed dose formulations for use in low and middle income countries. She was the executive-director of the Medicines Patent Pool until June 2012. She won several awards for her work on the effects of exposure to the drug (DES) in the 1980s and 1990s, including the prestigious Harriet Freezerring award in 1989. In 2005, 2006 and 2010 she was listed as one of the 50 most influential people in intellectual property in the world by the journal Managing Intellectual Property. She is a research fellow at the IS HIV/AIDS Academy of the University of Amsterdam and authored the book "The Global Politics of Pharmaceutical Monopoly Power. Drug patents, access, innovation and the application of the WTO Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health." which was published in January 2009 and is available for free download here: www.msfaccess.org/content/glob.... She is a member of the World Health Organization's Expert Advisory Panel on Drug Policies and Management and a member of the advisory board of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM).
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respect for ellen
I am a biologician from Poland. What uis it with the Pharma that is there for money making for the companies, rather than the companies for the patients. Lets do it. Change the paradigm. New drugs patent are needed otherwise no new meds.
This is a very important but complex subject that Ellen ‘t Hoen is presenting. As much as I would like to agree and support her emotionally, logically it is not as cut and dry. Pharmaceutical development in the United States, according to the FDA, is a five step process that starts with discovery and development in laboratories, followed by multiple rounds of research and testing, finally finishing with reviewing and monitoring for safety and efficacy. This process is incredibly labor intensive and costly. ‘t Hoen is suggesting the ability for pharmaceutical companies to patent their intellectual property to try to recoup the money invested in their research and development (R&D) of anti-retroviral medications is morally wrong. She is compelling them to share patents from benevolence, the ethical principle of beneficence. Beneficence in ethics is the moral obligations to not only refrain from causing harm, but also to have an obligation to help their others. We assume that the pharmaceutical companies exist to help others because the products that they develop are helpful, or benevolence, but they are largely for profit corporations. The concept of profit clearly conflicts with the assumption that their purpose is benevolence.
It is a compelling concept to help other for the greater good, but when you require it as ‘t Hoen suggests, it can often have the opposite effect. Pharmaceutical companies may refocus their efforts to more profitable drugs and illnesses and leave R & D of low profit medications to nonprofit biomedical companies. Whereas, “Recent evidence suggests that biotechnology companies are significantly more likely to experience a phase III clinical trial failure than the traditional pharmaceutical industry-74% compared with 5%”. (Czerepak A, Ryser S. Drug approvals and failures: implications for alliances. Nat Rev Drug Discov. 2008;7:197-198). This suggests that this may actually be a waste of resources and be harmful in the long run.
you never finished your story. I get that side of the coin where it is very costly and takes a huge amount of effort. Even so, from an ethical standpoint I think you can't deny people access to livesaving medication. In these instances though I think we should have a system where the govt. remunerates these companies and in exchange the citizens could pay a reasonable amount (linked to income) of health insurance.
I believe what they were saying was that if you have something more of a rare condition, you are kind of screwed because a big pharmacy company isn't going to spend big bucks on R & D to put out a drug that isn't going to have many sales.
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