5.3 Recommendations - InterAcademy Council

Governments of developing nations should focus on licensing issues, accept strong intellectual property rights for new medicines, negotiate special agreements on generics for basic pharmaceutical products, promote local industry through partnerships with foreign companies, and amend their current intellectual property legislation to emphasize the genuine invention of useful technologies while putting less focus on the protection of minor or intermediate technologies and research and development processes.
Governments of industrialized nations should offer research grants for poor-country diseases, promote global health initiatives, provide tax incentives to major companies for working with developing nations and for doing automatic licensing and other initiatives, and they should support the extension of the grace period under the Agreement for Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) to 2016 for most developing nations.
The multinational private sector based in the S&T-advanced countries should waive patent fees on the few existing patented tropical-disease drugs, and make them available for free in some cases (e.g., as with Merck's therapy for onchocerciasis and Novartis's therapy for leprosy). It should allow automatic licensing for S&T-proficient and S&T-developing countries to produce generic drugs (as long as they honor a ban on exportation of the generics to the high-income markets of the industrialized nations). And it should build real partnerships with developing nations' private sectors, consider market segmentation for the developing world, and actively encourage extensions of the grace period under the Agreement for Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) to 2016 for most developing nations.
The national academies should become more actively involved in bringing together the private and public sectors; and they should work across sectoral and national boundaries to help promote collaboration between the industrialized and developing nations, as well as among the developing nations. Scientists and engineers can play especially productive roles here in articulating creative proposals for different countries and sectors, making available intermediate inputs in research, access to digital information online, and wide bandwidth links between public research facilities and the new digital libraries of the future.