February News from BIO Ventures for Global Health

As the United States government prepared to enter World War I, the desperate need for aircrafts prompted pressure on the aircraft industry to form a patent pool to encourage rapid engineering innovation and manufacturing. This rather unusual arrangement was viewed as a critical step to encourage technological progress in an extreme threat to national security. Although the intellectual property system was devised as a way to legally protect ideas and investments, as well as serve as an incentive to inspire innovation and promote scientific progress, individuals and companies sometimes decide to act to share intellectual property in times of need, and for the public good.

At BIO Ventures for Global Health, we believe in the power of intellectual property and what it can do to accelerate innovation, particularly for global health.That's why we recently announced that we are partnering with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), and Alnylam to engage the global health community in using the powerful resources of the GSK and Alnylam Knowledge Pool. One year ago, the Knowledge Pool was announced as a result of GSK scientists' efforts to screen thousands of compounds for activity in 16 neglected tropical diseases. GSK identified and contributed over 500 granted patents and over 300 pending applications covering approximately 80 GSK patent families that cover small molecules and their formulations, uses, and processes for neglected tropical diseases. Alnylam then donated more than 1500 issued or pending patents on its RNA interference (RNAi) technology patent estate.

This is undoubtedly a vast resource for researchers; however, for many academic and global health non-profit groups, intellectual property can be perceived as preventing rather than enabling their work. The primary objective of the Knowledge Pool is to help those innovative non-profits and academic research centers working on developing products for neglected diseases to speed up their efforts by accessing the patents, technologies, and product development expertise available in the Knowledge Pool. At BIO Ventures for Global Health, we are committed to using our new role as administrator of the Knowledge Pool to closing this cultural gap and ensuring maximum utility of the Pool's resources and expertise to benefit the public good.

To carry out this role, we are organizing disease-specific meetings that identify the gaps in expertise and intellectual property that currently exist in product development for neglected diseases. We will help global health researchers work with the resources of the Knowledge Pool to fill these gaps so that the resources generously made available by companies will be used to create medicines for neglected diseases faster and more efficiently. We are excited to accelerate the use of this important resource so that industry and global health researchers can work together toward the critical common goal of saving millions of lives in poor countries.

Stay tuned for updates as the disease-specific meetings move forward.

For more information, please see the press release on the GSK/Alnylam Knowledge Pool.