Day November 14, 2018

Democratising Knowledge: A Report on the Scholarly Publisher, Elsevier

[Jonathan Tennant] Executive Summary: Elsevier are the largest and most powerful scholarly publisher, a status achieved through a long history of mergers and acquisitions and rigorously capitalistic business practices. The core issues surrounding Elsevier are that it operates its business primarily through charging for what should be public knowledge and education, with aggressive pricing strategies and marketing tactics that are anti-competitive and a drain on the higher and further education sectors. It has a long history of fighting against public access to knowledge, through a combination of political lobbying, public campaigns against openness, and regressive business models and strategies.

MPP-AbbVie License on Glecaprevir and Pibrentasvir (G/P): Backtracking on Geographic Coverage but with Options for Oppositions, Compulsory Licenses, and Negotiated Territorial Expansion

AbbVie and the Medicines Patent Pool have negotiated a royalty-free licensing and sublicensing agreement on a priority hepatitis C direct acting antiviral, glecaprevir and pibrentasvir (G/P).  This G/P combo is recommended by the WHO as a pan-genotypic adult first-line regimen with ongoing Phase 3 trials for adolescents and children.  G/P has a high resistance barrier and the shortest treatment duration of any HCV regimen to date.