UNU Forum: "Prize or Patent? Innovative Ideas for Funding Medical Drug Development and Access”

Prize or Patent? Innovative Ideas for Funding Medical Drug Development and Access

20 March 2008 | 3:00 - 5:30 pm

Conference Room 7, UN Headquarters, New York

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A United Nations University Panel Discussion

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“Exclusive rights to market products are one way to reward successful product research and development, but not the only way. Prize funds are another way and have been used successfully to stimulate inventions and solutions to difficult problems.”

(S.2210 – The US Medical Innovation Prize Act, 2007)

Reforming the way we pay for R&D on new medicines involves a simple but powerful idea. Rather than give drug developers the exclusive rights to sell products, the government would award innovators money: large monetary “prizes” tied to the actual impact of the invention improvements in health care outcomes that successful products actually deliver.

(Love and Hubbard, 2007)

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There is little doubt that the current approach to rewarding the development of new medicines or diagnostic devices has severe deficiencies. Patent-enforced monopolies often lead to unnecessarily high prices, primarily due to the large sums spent by drug companies to market their products. According to critics awarding such marketing exclusivity contributes to the development of medicines that do not offer significant improvements over existing therapies, and often fails to stimulate investment in areas of public interest and priority.

The prize system is a way of rethinking the problem. Prizes are already being used to attract research into specific medical problems, such as identifying biomarkers for a disease, or developing a rapid diagnostic test for tuberculosis.

For donors and governments, especially, prizes provide a potentially useful tool to attract private investments in new or neglected diseases in both developed and developing countries.

On 20 March, the UNU-Office at the United Nations and UNU-MERIT, a joint research and training centre of United Nations University and Maastricht University in the Netherlands, will co-organize a panel discussion on this topic at UN Headquarters, New York.

The panel will bring together experts from academia, government, finance and pharmaceutical sectors to discuss some of the key policy and implementation questions that need to be taken into account in designing and operationalizing effective medical prizes.

The event will build on some of the debates and conclusions from the recent international workshop on Medical Prizes in the Netherlands the recent Knowledge Ecology International/UNU-MERIT International Workshop on Medical Prizes in Maastricht on 28-29 January 2008.

Invited speakers include:

Senator Bernie Sanders, Sponsor, The Medical Innovation Prize Act, US

Jamie Love, Director, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI)

Kalipso Chalkidou, Associate Director of Research and Development, National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE, UK)

A.E.O Ogwell, Head of International Relations, Ministry of Health, Kenya

Dilip Shah, Secretary General, Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance

Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Head, Collaborative Creativity Group, UNU-MERIT