Bringing Hopkins to the Table
Ensuring Humanitarian Access to Health-Related
Technologies
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
“The right to life includes the right to
health and access to treatment.”
Articles 1&25, Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, 1948.
Montreal Statement on the Human Right to
Essential Medicines. www.accessmeds.org
“The Scientist’s Story”
NYTimes Editorial: March 19, 2001 By William Prusoff.
“I once helped create a drug that could enable millions of people
to lead better and longer lives…More recently, it became apparent
that the drug Dr. Lin and I had developed was not reaching
millions of desperately suffering people because they lacked the
money to purchase it.”
Impact of Generic Competition:
Uganda
Access Gap
Ten million people die needlessly each year
because they do not have access to existing
medicines and vaccines
90% of the world’s Research & Development
costs are spent addressing 10% of the global
disease burden.
Research Gap
The Philadelphia Consensus
• Promote equal access to research.
• Promote research and development
for neglected diseases.
• Measure research success
according to impact on human
welfare.
Signatories
Paul Farmer
Jeffrey Sachs
Stephen Lewis
Howard Hiatt
John Polanyi
Marcia Angell
Arnold Relman
Zackie Achmat
Paul Davis
D.A.Henderson
Chris Beyrer
Leonard Rubenstein
Jim Yong Kim
Alan Berkman
Victoria Hale
ACT-UP Oakland
MSF
Oxfam International
African Services Committee
Global Health Council
“Biomedical knowledge and achievement is
growing at a tremendous pace, but is
unmatched by ethical thinking about how to
apply the results equitably, humanely and
wisely. The universities are forgetting their
role as guardians of human wisdom, and
instead are selling out to the highest bidders.
UAEM has created consensus. Now it is time
for the policy makers to act."
Sir John Sulston, Nobel Laureate in Medicine
Ball is in our
court
Universities have an opportunity
and a responsibility
dissemination of knowledge
public health
university innovation
The Hopkins Vision & Tradition.
Hopkins Mission Statement: “to educate its students
and cultivate their capacity for life-long learning, to
foster independent and original research, and to
bring the benefits of discovery to the world.”
Technology Transfer Vision Statement: “Our success
will be defined by how effectively we facilitate access
to JHU technology…”
Health-Related Innovations
Include but are not limited to:
Innovations at other universities…
Emory and Emtricitabine/Emtriva
University of Washington
"The goal of maximizing license revenue can
sometimes come into conflict with the goal
of maximizing the availability and broadest
use of UW technology…UW affirm[s] that its
primary goal in technology transfer is to
maximize the worldwide use and societal
benefit of its research and technology."
Stanford White Paper
California Institute of Technology
Cornell University
Harvard University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Stanford University
University of California
University of Illinois, Chicago
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
University of Washington
Yale University
Association of American Medical Colleges
We just have to do it.
• Non-exclusive licensing, with
copyleft/patent pool conditionality.
• Non-exclusive licensing.
• First-round offer of no-exclusivity.
• Shorter periods of exclusivity.
• Exclusivity short auction.
Recommendations
1. Non-exclusivity
2. Transparency
Bayh-Dole Act
• The purpose of research at Universities
has never been profit!
•No patents primarily concerned with
therapeutics or public healthy may be
taken out by any member of the University,
except with the consent of the President
and Fellows; nor will such patents be taken
out by the University itself except for
dedication to the public.