Essential Medicines News

On 29 September, U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) introduced the Public Research in the Public Interest Act of 2006. This bill would allow the production of generic pharmaceuticals in lower- and middle-income countries before the patent life had expired, for drugs developed at public institutions.

At the time, Leahy was the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee in a Republican-controlled Congress. In the November elections, Democrats won a majority in the Senate, so Leahy will chair the committee in the 110^th Congress, which will come to session in January. He recently reaffirmed his commitment to increasing the availability of essential medicines for the world’s poor in an address at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C.

Reforming our patent system will also be an enormous, but critically important, project in the new Congress. Our Constitution enshrined patent rights for a reason: “to promote the progress of science and useful arts.” The spirit of American innovation has made the United States the world’s leader in intellectual property. Yet the expressions of American innovation – in the form of patented goods and processes – are only as good as the system that fosters and protects innovation. Our patent system was created in another century, and we need to update it. It must serve the 21^st Century industries that have made us the envy of the world, just as it well served the smokestack industries of an earlier era.

Complementing that effort, I intend to redouble efforts to reexamine our patent laws in the hope that by making thoughtful and practical changes we can greatly increase access to essential medicines throughout the world. We can help struggling families in developing nations, while improving U.S. relations with large segments of the world’s population. The current global health crisis is one of the great callings of our time. Whether it is the Avian Flu, AIDS, SARS, West Nile Virus, or the approaching menace of multi-drug resistant bacteria, we need to recognize that the health of those half way around the world now influences our security and affects our lives here in the United States. I want the work of the Judiciary Committee to be a catalyst to help make life-saving medicines more readily available around the world.