It is appropriate that this issue of the Bulletin coincides with the report of the WHO Commission on Intellectual Property and Innovation in Health (CIPIH).1 Developing health technolog gies for the world’s poor people increasg ingly requires the wise management of intellectual property (IP), and the papers in this issue all treat IP as a strategic asset. Vaccines, DNA patenting, and the innova...

Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) represent the highest burden of disease globally. Medicines are a critical intervention used to prevent and treat CVD. This review describes access to medication for CVD from a health system perspective and strategies that have been used to promote access, including providing medicines at lower cost, improving medication supply, ensuring medicine quality, promoting...

Medicines are an essential building block of a functioning health system and represent a substantial part of total health expenditure. The objectives of this review are to give an overview of access to medication for cardiovascular disease (CVD) from a health system perspective and to describe strategies that have been used to promote access, including providing medicines at lower cost, improvi...

BACKGROUND This paper has set out to map the state of pharmaceutical regulation in the developing world through the construction of cross-national indices drawing from World Health Organization data. The last two decades have been characterized by deep changes for the pharmaceutical sector, including the complete transformation of intellectual property systems at the behest of the World Trade O...

Recognizing access to HIV treatment as a human right has been important in efforts to ensure greater resources for the scale up of ART globally. However, it has not always been accepted by governments, and those asserting the right to HIV treatment have sometimes been in conflict with those asserting other rights, such as the right to intellectual property. Some governments have disputed their ...

Since the first WHO Model List of Essential Medicines was adopted in 1977, it has become a popular tool among health professionals and Member States. WHO's joint effort with the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has resulted in the inclusion of access to essential medicines in the core content of the right to health. The Committee states that the right to health c...

Recent years have seen significant advances in the science of using antiretroviral medicines (ARVs) to fight HIV. Where not long ago ARVs were used late in disease to prevent sick people from dying, today people living with HIV can use ARVs to achieve viral suppression early in the course of disease. This article reviews the mounting new scientific evidence of major clinical and prevention ARV ...

Congress is current considering legislation that would create a regulatory pathway for follow-on biologics. One critical issue in this regard is the issue of data exclusivity for innovators. This is an important form of intellectual property that complements patent protection. Data exclusivity is the period of time before a follow-on competitor can enter the market with an abbreviated filing th...

BACKGROUND In September 2003, the Canadian government committed to developing legislation that would facilitate greater access to affordable medicines for developing countries. Over the course of eight months, the legislation, now known as Canada's Access to Medicines Regime (CAMR), went through a controversial policy development process and the newspaper media was one of the major venues in wh...

BACKGROUND This article is based upon data gathered during a study conducted in partnership with the World Intellectual Property Organization on the patent status of products appearing on the World Health Organization's 2013 Model List of Essential Medicines (MLEM). It is a statistical analysis aimed at answering: in which developing countries are patents on essential medicines being filed? M...