Brief description of the lecture:

We all understand and appreciate that developing and bringing to market of new medicinal products requires huge investments.  It is for that reason that the pharmaceutical industry (including biologics) benefits from a wide range of innovation incentive mechanisms, many of which provide some form of temporary exclusivity. Recent times have, however, demonstrated that the difficult equilibrium between the right to incentives for those who invest in developing and bringing to market new pharmaceutical products and the right to have access to health and medicinal products for society gets more and more into peril. With a view to demonstrate this disbalance, I want to focus on three areas where the last decade has shown problematic shifts: repurposing of drugs, orphan drugs and indication stacking and sub-setting and access to medicinal products and pandemics. I will demonstrate that in all those areas inequities have (slowly) crept in, and there is a need for rebalancing the right to exclusivities and needs of society, also taking into account public purse constraints.

Short biography:

Dr. Sven J.R. Bostyn (LLB, Lic. Jur., LLM, PhD) is Associate Professor of Biomedical Innovation Law at the Centre for Advanced Studies in Biomedical Innovation Law (CeBIL http://cebil.dk ), Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen. He was member of a Scientific Advisory Committee at the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences (Gene Patents Committee, 2002-2003) and was between 2013 and 2016 the Chair of the Expert Committee at the European Commission on the development and implications of patent law in the field of biotechnology and genetic engineering, after having been a member of and Rapporteur at an earlier European Commission Expert Group (2003-2006). Besides the European Commission, he has also advised both the Belgian and Dutch governments on policy matters regarding patentability of biotechnological and software inventions. He is often consulted as an expert in patent law, regulatory exclusivities and licensing matters, by government institutions and by practitioners in the framework of litigation.