Seminar with Sapna Kumar

Centralizing Pharmaceutical Innovation

Abstract

The patent system embodies a general principle of decentralization: by offering a multi-year exclusionary monopoly to inventors and their assignees, the government incentivizes firms to invent and develop new products. Firms consequently choose to innovate in areas in which the expected return outweighs the initial investment. Decentralization has led to major pharmaceutical breakthroughs and has created the widely-held belief that drugs are the success story for the patent system. However, the resultant drugs have not necessarily been what society needs most, such as new antibiotics and vaccines for preventing infectious diseases that pose a threat of a future public health emergency. During the COVID-19 pandemic, governments explored quasi-centralized approaches to drug development, such as funding companies through a mix of incentives. But this level of centralization is still dependent on patent rights and various exclusivities to incentivize drug development. Consequently, governments should consider managing the production of “infrastructure-adjacent drugs”—drugs that are needed to prevent future collapse of the healthcare system and economy, but whose development are not incentivized through traditional means. By licensing promising drug targets from small- to medium-sized pharmaceutical companies, governments could leverage private-sector innovation and foster future private drug development in critical areas, while controlling the intellectual property rights to the final drugs.

Registration 

Please register no later than the 12 October 2022 at 23:59 using this registration form

Bio

Sapna Kumar holds the John Mixon Chair in Law at the University of Houston Law Center and is the co-director of the Institute for Intellectual Property and Information Law. She has written extensively about international law and administrative law issues relating to patent rights. Professor Kumar is a 2018–2019 Fulbright-Schuman Innovation Grant recipient and researched the use of technically-trained patent judges at the University of Strasbourg’s Center for International Intellectual Property Studies in France and at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Germany. Professor Kumar received her J.D. at the University of Chicago, where she served as a staff member of the University of Chicago Law Review. From 2003 to 2006, she practiced intellectual property litigation in Chicago at Kirkland & Ellis LLP and at Pattishall McAuliffe. She then spent two years at Duke University Law School, where she was a Faculty Fellow and part of the Center for Genome Ethics Law & Policy. After completing her fellowship, Professor Kumar clerked for Judge Kenneth Ripple on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.