COVID-19
Africa needs vaccines. What would it take to make them here?
The authors of this article show that, by their estimates, the public market for vaccines in Africa could rise from $1.3 billion today to between $2.3 billion and $5.4 billion by 2030 (depending on the scenario). While Africa’s population is growing faster than that of most other regions, significant immunization coverage gaps remain, and new products (such as vaccines for Lassa fever or malaria) could be introduced and used widely on the continent. Leaders are increasingly aware of the importance of health security, both for its own sake and as a critical tool for securing the continent’s development, and are increasingly heeding calls for investments into vaccine manufacturing to prevent African countries from being last in line for vital supplies.
Podcast about vaccines and IP protection
Munk Debates wants to help the world rediscover the art of civil and substantive public debate by convening the brightest thinkers of our time to weigh in on the big issues of the day. Their debate on vaccines provides two interesting perspectives on the vaccine rollout and IP protection.
Opinion: How Intellectual Property Rights Helped America Fight COVID-19
James Pooley, a former deputy director general of WIPO and a member of the Center for Intellectual Property Understanding, explains in this article how past investments in R&D helped in the fight against Covid-19. Over the last 10 years alone, drug companies have invested more than $1.5 trillion in global pharmaceutical research (notably, the US—home to less than 5% of the world’s population—accounts for roughly half of all international pharmaceutical R&D spending). With this in mind, it takes years to develop a new medicine, conduct clinical studies, and navigate regulatory review; indeed, it costs $2.6 billion, on average, to bring a new drug to market. Patents, however, give innovators a fair opportunity to recoup their investment costs before generics firms can manufacture copycat medicines, making it possible for companies to chase state-of-the-art ideas.
Techinvention’s scFv libraries help fight COVID-19
Innovation Council member Techinvention, has successfully generated two scFv libraries using phage display technologies from the convalescent plasma of COVID-19 recovered patients. The library now with us includes one billion different clones of antibody genes (VHs-Vκs and VHs-Vλs) with high probability to get high affinity fully human antibodies. This library will be used for the development of monoclonal antibody against multiple proteins of SARS-CoV-2 to address the looming threat posed by emerging mutant strains. It can also be used for diagnostic purposes, bioassays kit development, affinity maturation, studying protein-protein interactions and developing antibodies against other viral diseases with grave consequences and unmet medical needs.
For more information please click on the following links:
TechInvention Lifecare Pvt Ltd (www.techinvention.biz)
Fiocruz, Brazil (https://lnkd.in/eF5tShs)
Bio-Manguihos, Brazil (https://lnkd.in/evVWeX2)
Launch Event of ACCELERATE2030 4th Edition, 25 March
The launch event of ACCELERATE2030 4th Edition as part of the United Nations SDG Global Festival of Action will take place on Thursday 25 March 2021 from 18.30 – 19.15 CET. This year’s theme is “Partnerships for Circular Economy” and the launch event will be an opportunity to meet global leaders as well as entrepreneurs supported by Accelerate2030, and to learn how your organisation can get engaged in 2021 and beyond.
The COVID-19 pandemic put in evidence that no organisation or individual can address the global economic, social and environmental challenges that we face with an independent approach. It is now time to rebuild the existing business models with a more circular approach and address change by prioritising solutions that help reform systems around the world.
Covid Vaccines: Intellectual Property and Access, a Melting Pot of Viewpoints
Innovation Council member SARIMA has published an article by Dr Andrew Bailey, in which he explains the various views on the issue of access to IP in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. He sees a need for governments to build capacity in the manufacture of vaccines, in order to both meet local demand and assist with pandemic response.
During the pandemic, there was incredible collaboration across institutional, corporate, and national boundaries to address the urgent health crisis. Bailey hopes that this experience will shape global thinking about collaboration, and about how to ensure equitable access to healthcare whilst taking care to properly respect the infrastructural investments, trade secrets, and know-how of manufacturers.
Bio-Pharmaceutical Manufacturing and R&D: The Impact of Policy Coherence in Trade Policy
This Innovation Council working paper illustrates the importance of policy coherence in the realm of biopharmaceutical manufacturing and R&D. Specifically, it shows that investing in diversified, geographically dispersed sources of R&D and production can increase manufacturing capacity and strengthen health security by complementing existing pharmaceutical production chains, thus making them less vulnerable to future supply chain shocks. It shows that counterproductive trade measures, such as tariffs on the development and production of vaccines and other health technologies, can slow development, and that—especially in light of the experience of Covid-19—distributed manufacturing and R&D capabilities are particularly useful in the area of biopharmaceuticals.
Considering All Sides of Medicines Patents
For many years, policy experts and others have engaged in wide-ranging debates about patents on pharmaceuticals, particularly in developing countries. On the one hand, it has been argued that IP protection provides crucial incentives to the pharmaceutical industry to undertake more research on tropical diseases. On the other hand, the patenting of pharmaceuticals has been criticised as causing challenges regarding access to medicines. The brief examines in detail the rationale for patenting medicines. The examination includes an investigation into the role of the patent system in relation to the pharmaceutical industry, the moral limits of patents, how the exclusion of a patent can create social costs, the rationale for the patenting of medicines and the incentive theory and how this can be balanced with access to medicines.
Patenting and Covid-19 Vaccines
Patents have had an important role in organising the collaborations that led to the development and commercialization of COVID-19 vaccines. Patenting is a crucial tool in research-based industries like pharmaceuticals and biologics and can be a means to encourage collaboration. Terms can be negotiated to have different types of expertise combined in one project. The virus will likely garner another sort of PIP-type or any other similar program which will encourage contractual licensing of innovative IP in exchange for access to specialized expertise or important biological data. Monopolisation should clearly be avoided, and patent pooling must be the way forward to obtain sufficient vaccines for Covid-19 as early as possible.
South Africa: Covid Vaccine Manufacturing
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.
How the pandemic catalyzed innovation in health IT, per 8 hospital execs
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated innovation at hospitals across the USA by forcing them to adopt new, digitally focused ways of delivering care, paving the way for further tech-enabled improvements after the pandemic subsides. In this interview, eight hospital and health system innovation leaders weigh in on how healthcare innovation trends have grown amid the pandemic.
The interviewees acknowledge that the pandemic has taken away everyone’s excuses as to why telehealth cannot work and instead made them focus on how and why it must work. Before the pandemic, most traditional brick-and-mortar providers in our industry saw telehealth as a threat and were thus quite biased to focus on its shortcomings. Not surprisingly, they were quick to point out why telehealth was not ideal – or even ‘dangerous’ – for ‘most’ encounters. Payers sang the same tune, as they have always been wary of the potential for unchecked overutilization of telehealth.
Why intellectual property rights are a key, not a curse, for COVID-19 vaccines
The whole world is waiting for the distribution of vaccines against COVID-19 and should be distributed to all adults globally over the next 18 months. Calls are getting louder that intellectual property rights (IPR) should be suspended to allow unfettered vaccine manufacture will mean faster access for developing countries. The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, gave tacit support this week, warning of a “catastrophic moral failure” caused by unequal access to COVID vaccines. However, IP has played a vital role in every step of vaccine research, manufacturing and distribution. The Pfizer/BioNtech partnership behind the first vaccine to be authorised in the US would not have taken place without strong IP rights.
In a competitive market, no single company will monopolise COVID vaccines or succeed in “profiteering”. A zero IP world would be a backward step and discourage companies from making urgently needed refinements to existing vaccines to combat new COVID-19 variants.