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- Title
Patents, Partnerships, and the Pre-Competitive Collaboration Myth in Pharmaceutical Innovation.
- Authors
Vertinsky, Liza S.
- Abstract
Public-private partnerships offer a promising alternative paradigm for pharmaceutical innovation in complex disease areas where there are both strong commercial interests and significant public need. They have the potential to reduce the tremendous waste associated with duplicative unsuccessful drug development efforts and to encourage the sharing of knowledge essential to accelerate pharmaceutical innovation. Patents threaten the potential of partnership strategies, however, by making it harder to sustain robust systems of knowledge sharing. Policymakers have tried to avoid this problem by focusing partnership strategies on areas deemed to be pre-competitive -- areas of collaboration without competition and typically also without patents. This Article suggests that the current pre-competitive approach to partnership strategies in pharmaceutical innovation is fundamentally flawed for two reasons. First, it ignores the competitive market pressures that both shape what is deemed to be pre-competitive and fuel tensions within partnerships between sharing knowledge and staking out proprietary rights to gain competitive advantage. Second, it limits partnerships to areas where sharing already occurs instead of concentrating them in areas where greater sharing is badly needed but unlikely to occur. Instead of a pre-competitive partnership strategy, we need a partnership strategy that works in areas of competitive collaboration. To support such a strategy, we need to recalibrate the balance of access and exclusion to knowledge that patents and other sources of exclusivity provide in the drug discovery and development process. The Article concludes that a targeted statutory patent fair use may begin to push the pharmaceutical industry towards more collaborative innovation, and that public and private efforts to accelerate cures for Alzheimer's disease provide a natural area for such an experiment.
- Subjects
UNITED States; PATENTS; PUBLIC-private sector cooperation -- Law &; legislation; DRUG development; ALZHEIMER'S disease; COMPETITIVE advantage in business; DRUG laws
- Publication
U.C. Davis Law Review, 2015, Vol 48, Issue 4, p1509
- ISSN
0197-4564
- Publication type
Article