International Policy Network (IPN), a nongovernmental educational organization focused on highlighting the role of free society institutions in social and economic development, recently discussed some of the limitations of the Unitaid pool for pharmaceutical patents. Written by Alec van Gelder and Philip Stevens, this report examines the implications involved in creating a pharmaceutical patent pool for anti-retroviral medicines (ARVs) in order to create treatments for HIV/AIDs. The executive summary can be found below.

What Purpose Unitaid’s Patent Pool?

Unitaid is a multilateral fund to provide sustainable funding for AIDS medicines, financed in part by small levies on airline tickets. Recently, Unitaid has taken steps to expand its remit to research and development (R&D) and has established a patent pool for the intellectual property rights protecting anti-retroviral medicines (ARVs). The rationale behind this move is the perception that patents on ARVs held by different companies hinder development of new "fixed dose combination" drugs (FDCs), because of the legal complications associated with combining pharmaceutical patents held by different rights holders. These FDCs form the backbone of AIDS treatment programmes in Africa and new combinations are needed for specific subpopulations such as children.

The Unitaid patent pool will ask companies to voluntarily contribute pharmaceutical patents on ARVs, which will allow third party organisations to research and experiment with different combinations. Any new medicines that emerge from the pool will be sold on a non-profit basis and the original patent owners will be given a royalty determined by the patent pool administrators and underwritten by Unitaid funding. In June 2010 a separate legal entity, the Medicines Patent Pool Foundation, was established to administer the pool. At the time of writing, no pharmaceutical company has committed a patent.

Is a patent pool the best way to spend money for global health research? Despite causing less than four per cent of mortality in less developed countries, HIV/AIDS already consumes around 40 per cent of all global health funding for R&D. Many more people die from easily preventable conditions related to infections and diarrhoea, for instance. Meanwhile, chronic conditions such as heart disease are rapidly displacing communicable diseases as the biggest health problem facing people in poor countries.

There is also the question of distributing any new ARVs that emerge from the pool, which face the major obstacle of dilapidated health infrastructure and a lack of trained personnel, which are the biggest barriers to access to medicines in the world’s poorest countries.