Innovation and the Sustainable Development Goals

To battle COVID-19, the world will need vaccines. Expanding global manufacturing capacity is part of ensuring there are enough to go around. Biovac, based in South Africa, is committed to the long fight against the pandemic. The CEO, Dr Morena Makhoana, estimates that Biovac will be able to produce as many as 30 million doses of a Covid-19 vaccine. Biovac is part-owned by the South African Government. The company is still engaged in talks with global pharmaceutical companies regarding manufacturing and producing Covid-19 vaccines at its facilities in South Africa. The emergence of the second, more lethal variant has added some complexity – and urgency.

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Ending the COVID-19 pandemic requires innovation. IP is part of the solution and drives competition. IP licensing allows the innovator to control which partners manufacture the product, ensuring high quality supplies, and to maximise low-cost access for low and middle-income countries. Philip Stevens and Mark Schultz show that the reality is different from what calls for the suspension of IPRs suggest in order to keep prices low and address supply shortages. A highly competitive market in COVID-19 vaccines is unfolding right now. There is no evidence that abolishing IPRs will achieve anything more than the licensing agreements currently in place between innovators and big-name vaccine manufacturers in countries like India and Brazil; and the emergence of procurement mechanisms like COVAX. The authors demonstrate how the IP system has put us in a position to end the pandemic and why we should allow it to continue doing its job.

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Ensuring that every country gets enough vaccines against COVID-19 should not only be done for humanitarian reasons: It is also of economic interest, says a study commissioned by the International Chamber of Commerce. If less prosperous countries do not receive sufficient vaccinations, the rich countries will have to bear the (economic) costs.

In the worst-case scenario: If wealthy countries are fully vaccinated by the middle of this year and poor countries are largely excluded – the global economy would suffer losses of more than $9 trillion, a sum greater than the annual output of Japan and Germany combined.

Even if researchers do not expect the worst and assume that developing countries vaccinate half the population by the end of 2021, the global economy would take a hit of between $1.8 trillion and $3.8 trillion.

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Speaking at a panel organized by the World Economic Forum and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), ministers from Canada, Denmark, Italy, Japan, Singapore, United Arab Emirates and United Kingdom announced their plan to lead the world in fostering responsible innovation and entrepreneurship. The Agile Nations Charter sets out each country’s commitment to creating a regulatory environment in which new ideas can thrive. Read full article here.

In this online pitch competition, three e-commerce companies from developing and least developed countries will pitch their story and will be asked a series of questions, with online participants deciding who wins.

In their pitch, finalists will have to provide practical e-commerce insights, actionable tips and innovative approaches. The aim is to share specific learnings, get inspired, and learn useful tips and tools to boost online sales. The winning e-commerce entrepreneur will receive a prize package worth 1,000 USD for digital marketing services.

The three companies are MYANiture from Myanmar, Booksie from Ghana, and Nanjala from Kenya.

As of November 2020, at least 44 manufacturing and production deals for COVID-19 therapeutics around the globe were made public. A number of these deals were intended to expand access to therapeutics to low and middle-income countries. In relation to all of them, licensing, enabled by a well well-functioning intellectual property system, has been a key enabler.

• Eli Lilly and Company and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as part of the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, have entered into an agreement to facilitate access to future Lilly therapeutic antibodies under development for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19, to benefit low- and middle-income countries. Lilly’s collaborators have agreed to waive their royalties on the Lilly therapeutic antibodies distributed in low- and middle-income countries as part of this initiative.
• Gilead has entered into voluntary licensing agreements with nine generics manufacturers to further expand supply of remdesivir to 127 countries that represent nearly all low-income and lower-middle income countries. Gilead has completed technology transfers with these companies, and they are beginning the manufacturing process.
• Merck, IAVI, and Serum Institute of India are collaborating to develop a neutralizing monoclonal antibody treatment for COVID-19. If successful, Merck will lead commercialization in developed countries and the Serum Institute will lead global manufacturing as well as commercialization in low- and middle-low-income countries, including India.

The need for the rapid development and global distribution of a vaccine to prevent COVID-19 infection has spurred a number of novel collaborations between the pharmaceutical companies, research entities, and other stakeholders. These collaborations aim to ensure broad access to new health technologies to address the pandemic.

• One example is the University of Oxford Jenner Institute vaccine candidate, developed with AstraZeneca, that included collaborations with Catalent Biologics (Italy), Symbiosis Pharmaceutical Services (UK), Oxford Biomedica (UK), Emergent BioSolutions, BioKangtai (China), and R-Pharm (Russia). Through the WHO’s Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator, AstraZeneca signed an agreement with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, on vaccine development, manufacturing, and procurement, ensuring 300 million doses of the vaccine for low- and middle-income countries. Separately, AstraZeneca also signed a license agreement with the Serum Institute of India (SII) to supply 1 billion doses of vaccine to low- and middle-income countries.
• Another example involves Sanofi and GSK, which signed a Statement of Intent with Gavi, to make available 200 million doses of their adjuvanted recombinant protein-based COVID-19 vaccine, if approved by regulatory authorities.
• A third example focuses on Johnson & Johnson.  The company has committed to bringing an affordable vaccine to the public on a not-for-profit basis for emergency pandemic use and anticipates the first batches of a COVID-19 vaccine to be available for emergency use authorization in early 2021.

This article examines the context in which the Oxford COVID vaccine was developed – such as the slow response to the Ebola outbreak – and new technological breakthroughs at Oxford’s Jenner Institute that enabled researchers to cut 10 years of vaccine work down to 10 months.

This video describes how Biovac, in collaboration with PATH and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is developing the world’s first Group B Strep vaccine.

SalivaDirect™ is a new process developed at the Yale School of Public Health to test persons suspected of having COVID-19 for the virus, SARS-CoV-2. It is ideal for large-scale testing and offers a number of advantages over traditional testing methods.

This paper by Gaetan de Rassenfosse looks for traces of discrimination against foreigners in the patent prosecution process, building on earlier work. It focuses on the case of China, looking in particular at patent applications declared as essential to a technological standard, so called standard-essential patents (SEPs). It finds there is discrimination in the treatment of such patent applications, which are less likely to be granted and/or to take longer to grant.