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ARTICLE · 15 MAY 2020

Pooling Patent Rights To Combat COVID-19

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The COVID-19 pandemic and its unprecedented reach has focused public health authorities and researchers on pursuit of diagnostic, treatment and vaccine innovations.

CanadaCoronavirus (COVID-19)
Noel Courage
Noel Courage
Carmela De Luca
Carmela De Luca
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The COVID-19 pandemic and its unprecedented reach has focused public health authorities and researchers on pursuit of diagnostic, treatment and vaccine innovations. One response has been a global initiative to create a World Health Organization (WHO) -led voluntary patent pool of rights related to patented COVID-19 technologies.1 The Medicines Patent Pool (MPP), a United Nations backed, public health organization founded in 2010, has thrown its support behind the initiative and recently announced an extension of their mandate to include any health technology that could contribute to the global response to COVID-19.2

What are patent pools?

Patent pools are voluntary agreements between two or more entities possessing patents to a particular technology. Healthcare patent pools involve setting up an administrative system to facilitate sharing of IP and data of multiple IP owners. The pool may deal with proprietary rights in regulatory test data, know-how, cell lines

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