A Quiet Week at Lake Woebegone

While the politically-motivated impasse in Washington has been closing in on precipitating a financial meltdown of the US and, in turn, world economy, it’s been a quiet week for the business of global health.  In my business development work, I rearranged the deck chairs by adding three pro bono clients and dropping one, but have [...]

Fio Cruise

One hobby horse that I ride is the idea that, as the developing world develops, it will also be developing the multiple inputs needed to support a biotechnology industry, one that will invent and make affordable and profitable products for both domestic use and export (e.g., my posting of April 8, 2010).  This topic was [...]

Access to Medicines/Access to Markets

When I attended BIO 2010, Biotechnology Industry Organization’s annual gabfest with 15,000 others in Chicago May 3-6 (BIO 2010), I was disappointed at not being able to attend a special session on May 5.  The Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), represented by Inder Singh, their director of drug access, and BIO Ventures for Global Health [...]

An Academic Approach to Global Health

On November 9, the Board of Trustees of the Association of University Technology Transfer Managers (AUTM) released and endorsed a “Statement of Principles and Strategies for the Equitable Dissemination of Medical Technologies” (AUTM Statement), which sounds like a good idea.  After all, US universities, which receive more than $24 billion each year in public funds [...]

Swimming in the Patent Pool

In February 2009 in a speech at Harvard Medical School, Andrew Witty, CEO of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), described four commitments the company was taking to address improving global health, one of which was the creation of a licensable set of GSK patents relevant to neglected disease drug development (the “Least Developed Country Patent Pool”) (Witty Speech).  [...]

Generic Open License Revisited

Early in 2008, Prof. Kevin Outterson of Boston University’s  School of Law and Dr. Aaron S. Kesselheim of the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (Boston) addressed a way in which the pharmaceutical originator (innovator) companies could make their patented products available at affordable prices to underserved populations.  In the article, [...]