Taking Technology Transfer Seriously to Covid, Patents, and Access Presented by: Ken Shadlen, Department of International Development (LSE) Date: Tuesday 16th June 2020 The Prevailing "Access" Approach - Relax legal barriers increase market entry and competition • Why rely on a single supplier when there are hundreds that can produce? • Need lots of doses? Let more firms produce - might learn new and better approaches (formulations, combinations); lower prices too • - Lesson from AIDS Logic informing "People's Vaccine" and WHO Covid-19 Technology Access Pool (CTAP) • Oxfam: "If the goal is mass production of safe and effective vaccines, we need as many factories producing as fast as possible without the need to ask for permission from large pharmaceutical corporations" • Alvarado and Tedros: "An open framework built around voluntarily shared information is not just good for science. It also will maximize the number of companies involved in producing in-demand technologies, thereby scaling up worldwide availability, lowering costs, and helping secure universal access" (emphasis added). A Sympathetic But Skeptical View - What if legal barriers are not the problem (or main problem)? • If the main barriers are legal (e.g. IP), then we focus on how to relieve the legal barriers (e.g. compulsory licensing). • - If the main barriers are production-related, then focus on technology transfer Different forms of tech transfer • Imitation; licensing • What if imitation (at scale) is difficult? • What if massive production - rapidly - is a high priority? Ventilators vs. Drugs - - GM effort to manufacture sophisticated ventilator designed and produced by Ventec • GM flew engineers to Washington to learn the production process • Pictures and videos to study • "A few dozen" engineers from Ventec on loan to GM When non-originator "generic" firms want to produce drugs, no need to fly scientists and engineers to the originators' facilities do all this - • Generics can reverse-engineer and scale-up production on their own. • Technology transfer occurs via imitation, not via partnership (licensing) What if drugs (vaccines, therapeutics) were like ventilators? • GM could do this on own, but more prone to error and would have taken longer • What if drugs (vaccines, therapeutics) were like ventilators in a time of pandemic? • Need for massive scaling-up of production, very quickly • Reducing IP to enable imitation not the key • Need originators actively working with producers to share knowledge, technology, and expertise Lower (small Higher (biologics, molecule drugs) vaccines) Lower (ordinary times) Importance of Speed Higher (pandemic Openness competition and Openness competition and Openness competition and Hierarchy Licensing? and What To Do? - "Do nothing" and "trust us" are not the policy prescriptions that follow • Encourage more technology sharing and licensing - • Still "attach strings" -- benchmarks of prices via HTA, think about global supply • Sharpen policy tools to intervene in case But if openness and competition likely to yield worse outcomes? • Temporal approach • CL for next products (not in SE cell) • "Priority Review Vouchers - inverted" Final Thoughts: Taking Production and Technology Transfer - The logic of patents: (1) incentives for innovation; (2) mechanisms for technology transfer • Pharma: typically focus on (1) • Technology is "transferred" easily via imitation; no licenses needed  (university-industry licensing) • But when the challenges are massive and rapid scaling-up of complex (hard to replicate) products, then we need to think more carefully about firm-to-firm (international) technology transfer too. Beyond the "small molecule, normal times" narrative