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Advance Market Commitments for R & D in Diseases That Disproportionately Affect Low‐Income Countries
Author(s) -
Kwabena Tetteh Ebenezer
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
the journal of world intellectual property
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.334
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1747-1796
pISSN - 1422-2213
DOI - 10.1111/j.1747-1796.2012.00442.x
Subject(s) - intellectual property , trips architecture , economic rent , business , access to medicines , public economics , affect (linguistics) , developing country , economics , economic growth , market economy , political science , law , parallel computing , computer science , linguistics , philosophy
There has been a growing focus on finding ways to increase the availability of beneficial health technologies for the diagnosis, treatment, prevention, elimination and eradication of neglected diseases that disproportionately affect low‐income countries. A number of interventions have been suggested but one mechanism that appears to have gained favour is advanced market commitments ( AMC s), which has been piloted with the pneumococcal conjugate vaccines. AMC s aim to inflate and reduce the uncertainty around the stream of expected quasi‐rents provided by (uninsured) healthcare demands in low‐income countries to encourage private pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms to undertake the desired R & D investments. This paper evaluates the potential of AMC s to increase the supply of new molecular entities ( NME s) for neglected diseases and notes that AMC s are the appropriate instruments as long as the global community relies (wholly or in part) on private firms to make systematic rather than piecemeal public service or philanthropic investments. It calls for a review of W orld T rade O rganization ( WTO )'s T rade‐ R elated I ntellectual P roperty R ights ( TRIPS ) agreement to explicitly recognize the inadequacies of intellectual property rights ( IPR ) and patent protection in stimulating innovation and access to health technologies for neglected diseases.