|
9th September 2009 (Wednesday)
Magnolia Hall, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this report are solely of the speakers and do not necessarily in any way reflect the opinion or views of the Centad and the organizations they are affiliated to.
Introductory Session
Mr. Linu Mathew Philip, Executive Director, Centad warmly welcomed all distinguished resource people and delegates attending the consultation. He began the introduction by stating the importance of platform technology as an inter-phase to access medicine, in a time when pathogens were getting more resilient and there are fewer technologies to take on these issues. Mr. Philip also mentioned about Centad’s dreams of access to medicines by taking on the policy issues effectively and aggressively. To make policies enable in such a way that people can have access to medicines and access to innovations, adding that technologies can find a good solution to these existing disease and the diseases that maybe coming in the course of time.
After the Welcome Address, Mr. Yogesh Pai, Associate Fellow, Centad, and the project leader of the IDRC study on access to patented knowledge contextualized the purpose of the consultation.
Mr. Yogesh Pai once again welcomed all the delegates. He explained about the purpose of the folder materials, which contained a concept note that briefly describes what the IDRC project is about, what is the aim of the study and what are its plans for the next few months.
He explained that the consultation was in a context of study which was commissioned by the International Development Research Center (IDRC) Canada to Centad, as Centad is among the few worldwide research based institute that were part of such a study.
Yogesh detailed that the topic of this study was about "Utilizing Compulsory License as a means to access platform technologies" in healthcare sectors, specifically into TB and malaria", as they are one of the most neglected diseases and the purpose of this study was to draw empirical evidence on what all these platform technologies are. Mr. Yogesh said that the term platform technology was a broad term and may be a vague term and a workable definition had to be arrived on as what should constitute platform technologies. He suggested that platform technologies could be defined as follows "These are technologies that can be put into multiple uses; they are used for more than one category of product design in a scientific study and these are also in the nature of research tools".
He divided the consultation into two halves with the morning session relating to scientific side of the study on TB and malaria, technologies and methods employed and the details and the post lunch sessions would be on policies and technical interface and conceptualizing on what are platform technologies with a final note on regulatory session.
The plan of the study was to document these platform technologies essential to develop a treatment for malaria and tuberculosis and trends in patenting thereof, study their implications for downstream product, implications for treatment of malaria and TB, and recommend technologies qualifying for commercial license under patent laws and by the use of competition law in India.
Yogesh briefly highlighted the final purpose of the study is to
- To draw correlation between research and those technologies which are not openly available,
- Explore ways and means to integrate the right of compulsory license in cases specified into the administrative and judicial process to facilitate platform technologies and to explore linkages from right to health and compulsory licenses,
- To cull out a regulatory account for an Indian response to a potential problem like a platform technology blocking or restricted access to follow on innovation and commercial production.
He said that an all India survey and interviews are going to be conducted and all the platform technologies required as aid in TB and malaria are going to be marked. With this note he concluded and called upon Dr. Sarala Subbarao, Sr. Scientist, ICMR and Former Director, NIMR to chair the first session.
Read More
Click here for the Programme Details
Click here to view all Presentations
Acknowledgement to Dr. K. Sriram, Senior Resident, Maulana Azad Medical College of Dental Sciences for preparing this report.
|
