WIPO Re:Search Side Event – Realisations And Steps Forward

Alongside the recent World Intellectual Property Organization General Assembly, the WIPO Global Challenges Division presented WIPO Re:Search, a public-private consortium to facilitate research on neglected tropical diseases, tuberculosis and malaria.

The side event took place on 9 October and this report of the side event was prepared based on notes from a participant.

WIPO Re:Search: Sharing Innovation in the NTD Fight

“Intellectual property delivers tremendous innovation where there is a market,” Anatole Krattiger, director of the Global Challenges Division, said at the event. “But where there are no markets, IP systems do not deliver, because this is not the public policy tool to address that particular need.” This provides a unique point of entry for WIPO, he added.

The intellectual property assets to leverage are more about access to compounds, know-how, show-how, platform technologies, screening hits, clinical trials. Most of the time, patents don’t come up, Krattiger stated.

WIPO Re:Search currently has 100 members, amongst them nine pharmaceutical companies but also private research institutes, universities and supporter organisations. Some 65 percent come from the “Group B” developed countries[i] but the emphasis has been put on the inclusion of African countries now representing 21 percent of the members. Asia and Latin America will come next, Krattiger said.

Collaborations between members are developed through the Partnership Hub, managed by BIO Ventures for Global Health, a non-for-profit organisation created by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Biotechnology Industry Organization.

In four years of operation, BVGH has brokered 95 collaborations. Of these, 50 are still active and four have moved into the second phase of research. In 2015, the focus has been put to further include developing countries institutions in the collaborations. As a result, of the 18 new collaborations concluded this year, 50 percent include developing countries, Krattiger added.

Licence-free for Research and Products in LDCs

Members are divided in three categories: users, supporters and providers. The last category members engaged themselves to provide some IP assets for research and have agreed “to grant users royalty-free licenses to this intellectual property for research and development, anywhere in the world, of products, technologies or services, for the sole purpose of addressing public health needs for any or all NTDs in LDCs,” according to the WIPO Re:Search Guiding principles [pdf].

For products that will result from licences through the consortium, they agreed to provide licences for these products on a royalty-free basis for use and sale in all LDCs and consider in good faith the issue of access to these products for all developing countries, Krattiger said.

Insights from the Consortium’s Representatives

Fidelis Cho-Ngwa is a researcher at the University of Buea, Cameroon, in a laboratory working in discovering and developing medicines against NTDs, in particular onchocerciasis (river blindness), a disease for which there is still no cure. A single drug exists currently, but it only kills the juvenile form of the worm. Furthermore, the pipeline to get the cure is empty because the market is not incentivizing, and current funds allocated are not sufficient to fill the gaps, he said.

For him, WIPO Re:Search contributes to developing collaborations with institutions with high technologies, an essential resource that is lacking in his laboratory. He also had a sabbatical in Novartis in 2013, during which he was trained in new techniques of natural product extraction.

WIPO Re:Search is an organisation that is filling gaps that no other organisation is filling, he said. As WIPO is about innovation and creation, this is the perfect place for this initiative to be based, Cho-Ngwa added. This helps developing country members to develop collaborations and have funding. He also noted that to develop drugs against NTDs, low-technologies such as natural products are vital and his laboratory has a comparative advantage in this field.

Martin Bernhardt from Sanofi stated that WIPO Re:Search brings something new. As an open innovation platform, it creates a new type of use of IP assets. This is beyond multilateral ownership, this creates a new ecosystem bringing different types of partners together around the table, he added.

This program has demonstrated its proof of concept and is a pragmatic approach, far from the ideological-driven debates, he said. According to Bernhardt, WIPO is the best place to host this project and convening different partners as it is a dispassionate environment which is essential to develop a common goal and create trust. WIPO Re:Search leverages expertise more broadly than with bilateral partnerships, as it is an open innovation model, Bernhardt said.

Drug companies are trying new ways of doing things and find new models, said Simon Holt of Novartis. WIPO Re:Search is a new model, a genuinely new approach. This is a small open door that we should enter in order to find new models. WIPO Re:Search is one of the first that we have seen starting to work in the IP field, he added.

The Way Forward: Role in the Product Development Phase

Some collaborations between members are reaching the next steps, which means pre-clinical development and clinical development. The WIPO Re:Search role in this phase of development remains uncertain, said Thomas Bombelles, head of Global Health in the WIPO Global Challenges Division.

WIPO Re:Search doesn’t manage product development, according to Krattiger. Some product development partnerships have the capability to do it, with better funding, and Re:Search should not duplicate, he added.

A participant in the briefing asked whether the research and development costs of drugs produced under WIPO Re:Search collaborations will be disclosed, and whether the price of the drugs would be delinked from the production costs. Krattiger said that this question is not up to date as the program is far from the product commercialisation phase. The research phase takes longer compared to other partnerships, but the value proposition of WIPO Re:Search is to involve researchers from developing countries in the program, he added.

Separately, an External Review of WIPO Re:Search will be published during a Global Challenges Seminar by Dr. Peter Hotez on Advancing a New Generation of “Antipoverty” Products to Combat Neglected Tropical Diseases, which will take place on 29 October 2015, from 10:45 am to 12:00 noon at WIPO headquarters.

[i] includes Western European countries, Norway, the United States, Switzerland, Japan, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Turkey, Israel and the Holy See

 

Image Credits: WIPO