Intellectual Property Rights

Medical patent rights and public access to medicine go hand in hand. During the last decade, this WTO created the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement, an international agreement that has had a significant impact on the pharmaceutical sector. TRIPS requires all WTO members to adapt the laws of IPR protection, obligates members to enforce IPRs, and contains provisions that allow countries to modify regulations. The purpose for the TRIPS agreement is to provide incentives for future inventions and get closer toward the goal of affordable access to medicine.

The Issues: It is not ethical to allow people in low-income countries to die of a disease when there are drugs available to treat them. In spite of patent incentives, only 11 out of 1223 chemicals developed in 1975-1996 were developed to treat extremely fatal diseases that affect populations in developing countries.

The Question: How do we encourage discovery of drugs and vaccines while ensuring that poor people in developing countries have affordable access to existing medicines?

Those who support IPRs believe that granting these rights provides incentives for further research and development. However, allowing the inventor to exclude others from making or selling the invention has its drawbacks: the inventor has a monopoly over the setting of prices (i.e. higher than normal market prices). The human rights perspective does not reject IPRs. Rather, it focuses on the effects that these rights cause and a solution to protect access to medicine by all who need them, especially with disadvantaged groups.