[Upd-discuss] PLoS article: Is Bayh-Dole Good for Developing Countries? Lessons
from the US Experience
robert weissman
rob@essential.org
Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:01:43 -0400
Dear all,
The following article, "Is Bayh-Dole Good for Developing Countries?
Lessons from the US Experience," appears in the current issue of PLoS
Biology. Bayh-Dole is the US legislation establishing rules for control
over government-funded inventions. It gives universities control over
inventions developed with federal support. Our article is critical of
the US experience; suggests that Bayh-Dole is not a proper model for
developing countries; and urges various safeguards for countries which
feel compelled to adopt Bayh-Dole legislation.
A formatted version with linked footnotes is available on the PLoS
website. The text of the article is printed below.
Robert Weissman
http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0060262&ct=1
Is Bayh-Dole Good for Developing Countries? Lessons from the US Experience
Anthony D. So*, Bhaven N. Sampat, Arti K. Rai, Robert Cook-Deegan,
Jerome H. Reichman, Robert Weissman, Amy Kapczynski
Recently, countries from China and Brazil to Malaysia and South Africa
have passed laws promoting the patenting of publicly funded research
[1,2], and a similar proposal is under legislative consideration in
India [3]. These initiatives are modeled in part on the United States
Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 [4]. Bayh-Dole (BD) encouraged American
universities to acquire patents on inventions resulting from
government-funded research and to issue exclusive licenses to private
firms [5,6], on the assumption that exclusive licensing creates
incentives to commercialize these inventions. A broader hope of BD, and
the initiatives emulating it, was that patenting and licensing of public
sector research would spur science-based economic growth as well as
national competitiveness [6,7]. And while it was not an explicit goal of
BD, some of the emulation initiatives also aim to generate revenues for
public sector research institutions [8].
We believe government-supported research should be managed in the public
interest. We also believe that some of the claims favoring BD-type
initiatives overstate the Act's contributions to growth in US
innovation. Important concerns and safeguards—learned from nearly 30
years of experience in the US—have been largely overlooked. Furthermore,
both patent law and science have changed considerably since BD was
adopted in 1980 [9,10]. Other countries seeking to emulate that
legislation need to consider this new context.
Overstating Claims
On a positive note, the BD Act required different agencies that funded
US research and development to adopt more consistent policies about
ownership of patents arising from federal funding [5]. One of BD's
intended virtues involved transferring default patent ownership from
government to parties with stronger incentives to license inventions. BD
assigned ownership to institutions, such as universities, nonprofits,
and small businesses, although it could just as easily have opted for
individual grant and contract recipients.
Nevertheless, many advocates of adopting similar initiatives in other
countries overstate the impact of BD in the US. Proponents note The
Economist's 2002 claim that the Act was “[p]ossibly the most inspired
piece of legislation to be enacted in America over the past
half-century” [11]. They also cite data (originally used by US
proponents of the Act) on the low licensing rates for the 28,000 patents
owned by the US government before BD to imply that the pre-BD legal
regime was not conducive to commercialization [12]. But as Eisenberg [5]
has argued, that figure is misleading because the sample largely
comprised patents (funded by the Department of Defense) to which firms
had already declined the option of acquiring exclusive title. Moreover,
these figures are of questionable relevance to debates about public
sector research institutions, because most of the patents in question
were based on government-funded research conducted by firms, not
universities or government labs [13]. Finally, and most importantly, the
narrow focus on licensing of patented inventions ignores the fact that
most of the economic contributions of public sector research
institutions have historically occurred without patents—through
dissemination of knowledge, discoveries, and technologies by means of
journal publications, presentations at conferences, and training of
students [6,14,15].
Throughout the 20th century, American universities were the nation's
most powerful vehicles for the diffusion of basic and applied research
results [16], which were generally made available in the public domain,
where industry and other public sector researchers could use them. These
activities were central to the rise of American technological success
broadly and to the growth of knowledge-based industries, such as
biotechnology and information technology, in particular.
Public sector research institutions also relied on generous public
funding for academic research—from a highly diverse group of federal
funding agencies—which grew dramatically after the Second World War, and
on the availability of venture capital to foster the development of
early-stage ideas [6]. These and other unique features of the US
research and development system explain much more about innovation in
the US after BD than the rules about patenting that BD addressed.
In the pre-BD era, discoveries emanating from public research were often
commercialized without patents, although academic institutions
occasionally patented and licensed some of their publicly funded
inventions well before BD, and these practices became increasingly
common in the 1970s [17]. Since the passage of the Act in 1980, US
academic patenting, licensing, and associated revenues have steadily
increased. BD accelerated this growth by clarifying ownership rules, by
making these activities bureaucratically easier to administer, and by
changing norms toward patenting and licensing at universities [6]. As a
result, researchers vested with key patents sometimes took advantage of
exclusive licenses to start spin-off biotechnology companies. These
trends, together with anecdotal accounts of “successful”
commercialization, constitute the primary evidence used to support
emulating BD in other countries. However, it is a mistake to interpret
evidence that patents and licenses have increased as evidence that
technology transfer or commercialization of university technology has
increased because of BD.
Although universities can and do patent much more in the post-BD era
than they did previously, neither overall trends in post-BD patenting
and licensing nor individual case studies of commercialized technologies
show that BD facilitated technology transfer and commercialization.
Empirical research suggests that among the few academic patents and
licenses that resulted in commercial products, a significant share
(including some of the most prominent revenue generators) could have
been effectively transferred by being placed in the public domain or
licensed nonexclusively [6,18].
Another motivation for BD-type legislation is to generate licensing
revenues for public sector research institutions. In the US, patents are
indeed a source of revenues for some universities, but aggregate
revenues are small. In 2006, US universities, hospitals, and research
institutions derived US$1.85 billion from technology licensing compared
to US$43.58 billion from federal, state, and industry funders that same
year [19], which accounts for less than 5% of total academic research
dollars. Moreover, revenues were highly concentrated at a few successful
universities that patented “blockbuster” inventions [20].
A recent econometric analysis using data on academic licensing revenues
from 1998 to 2002 suggests that, after subtracting the costs of patent
management, net revenues earned by US universities from patent licensing
were “on average, quite modest” nearly three decades after BD took
effect. This study concludes that “universities should form a more
realistic perspective of the possible economic returns from patenting
and licensing activities” [21]. Similarly, the head of the technology
licensing office at MIT (and former President of the Association of
University Technology Managers) notes that “the direct economic impact
of technology licensing on the universities themselves has been
relatively small (a surprise to many who believed that royalties could
compensate for declining federal support of research)… [M]ost university
licensing offices barely break even” [22].
It is thus misleading to use data about the growth of academic patents,
licenses, and licensing revenues as evidence that BD facilitated
commercialization in the US. And it is little more than a leap of faith
to conclude that similar legislation would automatically promote
commercialization and technology transfer in other, very different,
socioeconomic contexts.
Sources of Concern
What have we learned from the US experience with BD? Because the Act
gives recipients of government research funds almost complete discretion
to choose what research to patent, universities can patent not only
those inventions that firms would fail to commercialize or use without
exclusive rights, but also upstream research tools and platforms that do
not need patent protection and exclusive licensing to be adopted by
industry [6,9,10].
For example, while the patented technologies underlying recombinant DNA
were fundamentally important for biotechnology and generated ample
revenues for Stanford, the University of California, Columbia
University, and City of Hope Medical Center [6], the patenting and
licensing of these research platforms and technologies were not
necessary for commercialization. Both the Cohen-Boyer patents for
recombinant DNA and the Axel patents on cotransformation were rapidly
adopted by industry even though neither invention came with the BD
“carrot” of an exclusive right. The Cohen-Boyer patents reportedly
contributed to 2,442 new products and US$35 billion in sales. Its
licensing revenues to Stanford University and the University of
California San Francisco were US$255 million [23]. With 34 firms
licensing the technology, the Axel patents earned US$790 million in
royalties for Columbia University over the patent period (Colaianni and
Cook-Deegan, unpublished data). While the patenting and licensing of
these inventions clearly enriched the universities involved, there is no
reason to believe that nonexclusive licensing (as opposed to simple
dedication to the public domain) deterred commercialization of the
invention(s). In fact, Columbia University justified efforts to extend
the life of its Axel patents not because such extension would improve
commercialization, but rather because it protected royalty income that
would be channeled back into its educational and research mission.
While BD gave those conducting publicly funded research the discretion
to patent fundamental technologies, changes in US patent law since 1980
provided the means, by expanding eligibility standards to include basic
research and research tools. These trends have been notable in the
biotechnology and information technology sectors [24,25]. A widely
watched, recent consequence of this shift involves the suite of
University of Wisconsin patents on embryonic stem cell lines [26–28].
Biotechnology firms eager to do research on stem cells have complained
about the excessive licensing fees that Wisconsin charges (as well as
about “reach through” provisions that call for royalties on any product
developed from research on embryonic stem cells, and impose restrictions
on use) [29]. Rather than promote commercialization, these patents on
basic research platforms constitute a veritable tax on commercialization
[30]. Nor were these efforts to tax future innovation unprecedented, as
the example of recombinant DNA shows. The Wisconsin Alumni Research
Foundation's extension of licensing terms to academic research
institutions [31] and its imposition of restrictions on use became
especially controversial because these measures went beyond the
Cohen-Boyer precedent. The manager of recombinant DNA licensing at
Stanford quipped, “[W]hether we licensed it or not, commercialization of
recombinant DNA was going forward…a nonexclusive licensing program, at
its heart, is really a tax…But it's always nice to say ‘technology
transfer’” [32].
The broad discretion given to publicly funded research institutions to
patent upstream research raises concern about patent thickets, where
numerous patents on a product lead to bargaining breakdowns and can
blunt incentives for downstream research and development (R&D) [33,34].
Barriers to bundling intellectual property necessary for R&D become
higher in frontier interdisciplinary research areas, such as synthetic
biology, microarrays, and nanobiotechnology, because they draw upon
multiple fields, some of which may be likelier than others to form
thickets over time [9,10,32,35]. Although there is some evidence that
biotechnology and pharmaceutical firms may be able to avoid thickets
through secret infringement or by “off-shoring” research to countries
with fewer patent restrictions [36], secret infringement and the
transfer of R&D to other countries are hardly tactics that government
policy should encourage.
The problems that BD has raised for the biopharmaceutical industry are
dwarfed by the problems it has raised for information technology.
Universities may too often take a “one size fits all” approach to
patenting research results, notwithstanding the evidence that patents
and exclusive licensing play a much more limited role in the development
of information technology than they do in the pharmaceutical sector
[37]. In testimony to the US Congress, a prominent information
technology firm complained that aggressive university patenting impeded
both product development and university–industry collaboration, which
encouraged companies to find other university partners, often outside
the US [38]. Expressing similar concerns in a proposal to explore
alternatives to the BD model, officials from the Ewing Marion Kauffman
Foundation (the leading US foundation supporting entrepreneurship
research) recently argued that “Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs) were
envisioned as gateways to facilitate the flow of innovation but have
instead become gatekeepers that in many cases constrain the flow of
inventions and frustrate faculty, entrepreneurs, and industry” [39].
These problems have not escaped the attention of funding agencies, most
notably the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), which has issued
guidelines stating that patents should be sought, and exclusive licenses
should be restricted, only when they are necessary for purposes of
commercialization [40,41]. Beyond such hortatory guidelines, however, US
funding agencies retain very limited authority to guide the patenting
and licensing practices of publicly funded research institutions. Under
BD, agencies can declare particular areas off-limits to patenting only
when they find “exceptional circumstances.” Moreover, they must present
this decision to the Department of Commerce, the primary administrator
of BD. The “exceptional circumstances” authority has only rarely been
used [30]. However, when exclusive licensing demonstrably impeded
commercialization, the funding agencies did not intervene by exercising
their authority to mandate additional licensing. Their reluctance to
take such action stems in part from the realization that, under the BD
regime as enacted, any mandate could immediately be challenged (and its
effect stayed) pending the outcome of protracted litigation [30].
Some of the top US universities have themselves begun to recognize the
difficulties that overly aggressive proprietary behavior can engender,
as demonstrated by their March 2007 declaration highlighting “Nine
Points to Consider in Licensing University Technology” [42]. How this
declaration will affect university behavior is difficult to predict.
Moreover, the “Nine Points” declaration focuses almost entirely on
licensing and fails to address how universities should determine whether
patents are necessary for commercialization in the first instance.
BD has also led to downstream concerns. The BD framework makes minimal
reciprocal demands from licensees of government-funded technologies, and
neither universities nor government agencies have sought to include
requirements that products derived from these inventions be sold to
consumers on reasonable terms [43]. Nor do funders require either
disclosure of follow-on investments, so that prices might reflect the
private contribution to development or the avoidance of abusive or
anticompetitive marketing practices [43–47].
Some have raised concerns that the Act contributed to a change in
academic norms regarding open, swift, and disinterested scientific
exchange [48,49]. For example, in a survey to which 210 life science
companies responded, a third of the companies reported disputes with
their academic collaborators over intellectual property, and 30% noted
that conflicts of interest had emerged when university researchers
became involved with another company [50]. Nearly 60% of agreements
between academic institutions and life science companies required that
university investigators keep information confidential for more than six
months—considerably longer than the 30 to 60 days that NIH considered
reasonable—for the purpose of filing a patent [50]. Similarly, in a
survey of life science faculties at universities receiving the most NIH
funding, nearly a third of the respondents receiving a research-related
gift (e.g., biomaterials, discretionary funds, research equipment, trips
to meetings, or support for students) reported that the corporate donor
wanted pre-publication review of any research articles generated from
the gift; and 19% reported that the companies expected ownership of all
patentable results from the funded research [51].
Although the surveys discussed above were conducted in the mid to early
1990s, their findings appear robust over time. In a more recent survey
of university geneticists and life scientists, one in four reported the
need to honor the requirements of an industrial sponsor as one of the
reasons for denying requests for post-publication information, data, or
materials [52]. This finding is also corroborated by a survey of US
medical school faculty. In these settings, researchers most likely to
report being denied research results or biomaterials by others were
“those who have withheld research results from others” or who had
patented or licensed their own inventions [53]. So the practices of
patenting and licensing clearly encumber the openness of scientific
exchange in universities.
Instituting Safeguards
Countries seeking to enhance the contributions of universities and
public sector laboratories to social and economic development have
numerous policy options. Many of these policies do not involve
intellectual property rights at all, but rather look to provide funds
for basic and applied research, subsidize scientific and engineering
education, strengthen firms' ability to assimilate university research,
and invest in extension, experimentation, and diffusion activities
[39,54,55]. But even policies focused on intellectual property
management need not presume that patenting and exclusive licensing are
the best options. For example, they may instead focus on placing by
default or by strategy government-funded inventions into the public
domain, creating a scientific commons, enabling collective management of
intellectual property, or fostering open-source innovation [56–60].
Where greater commercial incentives seem necessary, the benefits of
nonexclusive licensing should always be weighed against the social cost
of exclusive licenses.
The appropriate array of policies will vary from country to country:
there is no “one size fits all” solution. Based on our review above, we
believe it is doubtful that the benefits of legislation closely modeled
on BD would outweigh their costs in developing counties. For those
countries that nonetheless decide to implement similar laws, the US
experience suggests the crucial importance, at a minimum, of considering
a variety of safeguards (see Box 1).
Conclusion
While policies supporting technological innovation and diffusion
contribute to economic growth and development, the appropriate sets of
policies to harness public sector R&D are highly context-specific. Much
depends on factors such as the level of publicly funded research, the
focus of such research on basic versus applied science, the capabilities
of industry partners, and the nature of university–industry linkages
[54,55].
Recognizing these difficulties, reasonable minds may disagree about the
likely impact of BD-type legislation elsewhere. Nevertheless, the
present impetus for BD-type legislation in developing countries is
fueled by overstated and misleading claims about the economic impact of
the Act in the US, which may lead developing countries to expect far
more than they are likely to receive. Moreover, political capital
expended on rules of patent ownership may detract from more important
policies to support science and technology, especially the need for
public funding of research. Given the low level of public funding for
research in many developing countries, for example, the focus on royalty
returns at the expense of public goods may be misplaced [61].
Furthermore, it is unclear whether any of the positive impacts of BD in
the US would arise in developing countries following similar
legislation, absent the multiagency federal pluralism, the practically
oriented universities, and other features of the US research system
discussed above.
In any event, both the patent laws and patterns of scientific
collaboration have changed substantially since BD was passed in 1980. To
the extent that legislation governing the patenting and licensing of
public sector research is needed in developing countries at all, it
should reflect this new context rather than blindly importing a US model
that is 30 years old.
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Box 1: Safeguards Serving the Public Interest
Governments adopting laws styled after the US BD Act should be vigilant
to ensure that the public's interests are served. In commercializing
publicly funded research, a number of safeguards on patenting and
licensing practices should be built into any law or its regulatory
implementation.
No Exclusive Licensing Unless Necessary for Commercialization
Any BD-style legislation should be founded on the principle that
publicly funded research should not be exclusively licensed unless it is
clear that doing so is necessary to promote the commercialization of
that research. Public sector institutions should not, for example,
exclusively license research tools that were developed with public
funding if those tools can instead be used off the shelf by others.
Where exclusive licenses are not required for commercialization, one may
ask whether universities and public sector labs should be patenting
research at all. Will encouragement of patenting and nonexclusive
licensing, as in the Cohen-Boyer model discussed above, help or hurt
researchers, firms, and the public in developing countries? Even
nonexclusive licenses will tax downstream users, although presumably
with lower rents and transaction costs and more procompetitive effects.
As suggested above, revenues from licensing academic inventions are
likely to be minuscule for most institutions, and aggressive university
patenting can have other deleterious effects. A robust research
exemption can ward off some of the problems potentially associated with
restrictive licensing of upstream inventions [62].
Transparency
The legislation should ensure transparency in the patenting and
licensing of publicly funded research. Public accountability should
follow public funding. Institutions that engage in patenting and
licensing should be required to report or make public all information
that is necessary to determine whether they are reasonably serving the
public interest. Such information may include the number of patents and
licenses obtained, the funds expended on patenting and licensing
activities, licensing revenues, and the key terms (e.g., exclusive or
nonexclusive, humanitarian access, research exemption, definition of
market segmentation or field of use, performance milestones, and
march-in rights) of licenses. The lack of a transparency mandate is a
key flaw of the BD Act that should not be replicated.
Government Authority To Issue Additional Licenses
Where licensing arrangements for publicly funded research do not achieve
public interest objectives, governmental authorities must have power to
override such licenses and to grant licenses to additional or
alternative parties [9,10,43]. In the US, this authority is formally
embodied in the government's “march-in” rights under BD, but this power
has never been exercised. Petitions to invoke it have been made a few
times [46,47,63,64], but they have never been granted, and because of
the administrative disincentives built into BD, this power is unlikely
ever to be used [30]. To avoid this result, legislatures must develop
standards to ensure that march-in rights or comparable authority will be
exercised when public interest objectives are not otherwise attained.
In evaluating licensing options, those receiving government research
funding could also be required to consider the option of licensing
patented inventions to a “technology trust,” that is, a commons that
would ensure designated inventions remained available to all interested
parties on predetermined terms. Such a commons could enable the pooling
of socially useful bundles of technology, particularly research tools
and health technologies for neglected or rare diseases. Governments
might also consider reducing or waiving patent application and
maintenance fees for such inventions when they are made broadly
available for research and humanitarian application, without royalty,
for a specific geographical area or field of use.
Government Use Rights
The government should retain an automatic right to use any invention
arising from its funding. Under BD, the US government has an automatic
“nonexclusive, nontransferable, irrevocable, paid-up license” [65] to
use any invention developed with government funds. Typically, however,
it does not invoke such a license and often pays monopoly prices for
products that it funded. The US experience shows the importance both of
establishing that the government should be provided with an automatic
license in products resulting from its funding and of elaborating
standards to ensure such licenses are actually exercised in appropriate
circumstances.
From a broader perspective, governments retain the right to use any
invention, whether or not it arises from public funding, under
international law [66]. Governments may choose to use patented
inventions to promote public health [67], national security [66], or
comparable objectives, while public-interest compulsory licenses may
sometimes be granted to avoid abusive licensing practices or to ensure
access to patented research products on reasonable terms and conditions
[43,66]. Where publicly funded grantees fail to commercialize a
technology appropriately or to foster its availability, the trigger for
government use—under any enabling provision adopted in domestic law—must
work better than the march-in right has under BD.
Access to End Products
Besides promoting commercialization, the government must ensure consumer
access to end products. The public is entitled to expect that the
inventions it paid for will be priced fairly. The US experience shows
that a BD system that lacks mandatory rules concerning the affordability
of end products will not deliver on this reasonable expectation [43–47].
As a condition of receiving a license to a government-funded invention,
parties should be required to ensure that end products are made
available to the public on reasonable terms and conditions. What
constitutes “reasonable” will vary by national context, but it is
important to ensure that the term is defined with enough precision to be
enforceable.
Licenses to government-funded inventions should presumptively include
access-oriented licensing provisions that address humanitarian needs in
other countries [68]. One such provision is an open license for
production and sale of end products in (or to) developing countries in
exchange for a fair royalty [69]. At the very least, when inventions
have foreseeable applications in resource-poor regions, a plan for
access in those regions should be explicitly incorporated into
technology licensing.
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------
Anthony D. So is with the Program on Global Health and Technology Access
and the Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society, Terry
Sanford Institute of Public Policy, Duke University and the Duke Global
Health Institute, Durham, North Carolina, United States of America.
Bhaven N. Sampat is with the Department of Health Policy and Management
and the International Center for Health Outcomes and Innovation
Research, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New
York, New York, United States of America. Arti K. Rai and Jerome H.
Reichman are with the Duke University School of Law, Durham, North
Carolina, United States of America. Robert Cook-Deegan is with the
Center for Genome Ethics, Law & Policy, Institute for Genome Sciences &
Policy, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, United States of
America. Robert Weissman is with Essential Action, Washington, D. C.,
United States of America. Amy Kapczynski is with the School of Law,
University of California, Berkeley, California, United States of America.
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: anthony.so@duke.edu
------
Acknowledgments
This work emerged from “Emulating the BD Act: Steps to Ensure Innovation
and Access for Health in Developing Countries,” a meeting organized on
May 29, 2008 by the Program on Global Health and Technology Access at
Duke University's Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy. All of the
authors contributed to the writing of the paper. The authors
particularly appreciate the capable research assistance of Corrina
Moucheraud Vickery, Chris Manz, and Amy Forrestel.
Funding. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the Open
Society Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the Ewing Marion Kauffman
Foundation, as well as grants from the National Human Genome Research
Institute (Grant 5R01HG003763, Building a Technology Trust in Genomics),
and the National Human Genome Research Institute and the Department of
Energy (CEER Grant P50 HG003391, Duke University, Center of Excellence
for ELSI Research).
Competing interests. The authors report the following nonfinancial
conflicts of interest:
ADS is a Member of the Advisory Board for Universities Allied for
Essential Medicines and has conducted commissioned research for the
World Health Organization Commission on Intellectual Property Rights,
Innovation and Public Health (2005).
BNS is a Member of the Advisory Board for the Initiative for Medicines,
Access & Knowledge and has testified before the Secretary's Advisory
Committee on Genetics, Health, and Society, Task Force on Impact of
Patents and Licensing Practices on Clinical Access to Genetic Testing
(July 10, 2007).
AKR is a Member of the Scientific Advisory Board for Science Commons and
the Advisory Board for the Peer-to-Patent Project. She has testified
before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary hearing on “The Role of
Federally-Funded University Research in the Patent System” (October 24,
2007) and has conducted commissioned research for the World Health
Organization Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation and
Public Health (2005).
RC-D is a Member of the National Research Council Committee on
Management of University Intellectual Property and the Task Force on
Patent Reform of the Association of American Universities, Council on
Government Relations, Council on Education, National Association of
State Universities and Land Grant Colleges, and Association of American
Medical Colleges (joint committee). He has also conducted commissioned
research for the Secretary's Advisory Committee on Genetics, Health, and
Society, Task Force on Impact of Patents and Licensing Practices on
Clinical Access to Genetic Testing (ongoing) and for the World Health
Organization Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation and
Public Health (2005).
JHR is a Member of the Editorial Board for the Journal of International
Economic Law. He has testified before the NIH Public Hearing on March-In
Rights under the Bayh-Dole Act, National Institutes of Health (May 25,
2004).
RW is the Director of Essential Action. He is also Counsel to, and
Member of the Board of Directors of, Essential Inventions, which has
petitioned for the issuance of march-in licenses for two
government-funded pharmaceutical products, ritonavir and latanoprost. He
is also a Member of the Board of Directors for Health GAP (Global Access
Project) and the Board of Directors for Union for the Public Domain. He
has testified before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary hearing on
“The Role of Federally-Funded University Research in the Patent System”
(October 24, 2007).
AK is a Member of the Board of Directors for Universities Allied for
Essential Medicines.