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Prof. Srividhya Ragavan, Texas A&M University School of Law
This is an excerpt from a book announcement on TradeRxReport.com
Click here for the full announcement.

Amaka Vanni and I are pleased to share our new book, Intellectual Property Law and Access to Medicines: TRIPS Agreement, Health, and Pharmaceuticals. The book maps 25 years of TRIPS from the perspective of access to medication discourse by looking at  three generations of access to medication debate…

… Part I titled International Norm Setting and Patent Metamorphosis: First Generation shows the institutions and actors involved in the metamorphosis of pharmaceutical patents, both at the international and domestic levels. We call it first generation because it details key episodes in the pharmaceutical patent trajectory to tease out how the story and dialogue changed and the new fault lines that have been drawn leading to a notable divergence between IP rights in the pharmaceutical industry and those in any other industry.

Following this, Part II on State Actions and the Medicines Access Debate: Second Generation captures the role of state actors and their engagements as part of an emerging and changing global pattern. The chapters in this part examines how countries adapted to the globalization of patents and how their domestic patent law activities changed and continue to change the global narrative on public health and access to medicine.

The last Part titled Global Patterns and Emerging Issues: Third Generation highlights new changes and challengers to the existing framework. Here, focus is on the participation of civil society that brought patent law into the field of activism, the role of the private sector to mobilize the access to medicines issue, and the emergence of new issues which triggered a simultaneous convergence and divergence of regulatory standards.

The conclusion examines the COVID-19 pandemic in the context of the access to medication debate. The pandemic raised questions on the viability of the current IP system to foster trade, the role of pharmaceutical innovation, the importance of transfer of technological knowledge and generally, the imminence of access to medicine. It asserts that the current IP framework has ceased to be a model for delivering products critically needed to respond to global health emergencies.