CIPIL Intellectual Property Seminar: 'The legal ecology of resistance, or why normal IP rules shouldn't apply to antibiotics'

Speaker: Professor Kevin Outterson (Professor of Health Law, Bioethics and Human Rights, Boston University and Visiting Fellow at Chatham House, Centre on Global Health Security).

Location: G24

Abstract: Pharmaceuticals is one of the sectors where patent law is thought to work best, but for one major class of drugs – anti-infectives – the weaknesses of the patent system are becoming increasingly clear. Anti-infectives decline in effectiveness over time through resistance, driven by evolution. Resistance challenges one foundation of patent theory, namely nonrivalry of knowledge. Horizontal transfer of genetic material also undermines the economic value of patent boundaries in antibiotic molecules, akin to a pollution externality. The result is a growing awareness that the current business model for antibiotics is broken and a search for new approaches. This fall, the EU IMI will begin a major project to understand the problem and potential solutions.

Professor Outterson teaches health law and corporate law at Boston University, where he co-directs the Health Law Program. He serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics; faculty co-advisor to the American Journal of Law & Medicine; past chair of the Section on Law, Medicine & Health Care of the AALS; and a member of the Board of the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics. He blogs on health policy issues at www.theincidentaleconomist.com, one of the leading health policy blogs with over 2.5 million visitors thus far. His research work focuses on the organization and finance of the health sector. Areas of specialization include global pharmaceutical markets, particularly antibiotics and other antimicrobials that can degrade in usefulness over time through resistance. He leads an interdisciplinary project on the legal ecology of antimicrobial resistance, funded in part by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation program on public health law. He is a faculty affiliate at the Harvard Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, an appointed member of the Antimicrobial Resistance Working Group at the CDC, and a Visiting Fellow at the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House). Academic papers can be found at http://ssrn.com/author=34074.