GLOBAL: TIA and MIT join diseases patent pool

South Africa's Technology Innovation Agency, TIA, this month became the first government body worldwide to join the Open Innovation Patent Pool on Neglected Tropical Diseases. It followed the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in signing up to the initiative that promises to stimulate local innovations in the fight against diseases.

Through the agency, South Africa made the announcement at the BIO International Convention, a major meeting for the biotechnology industry that took place in Chicago from 3-6 May.

"Joining the pool for open innovation gives scientists and the biopharma industry in South Africa the opportunity to be associated with world-renowned players in the drug discovery and development field and to create new medicines that will save lives in South Africa and across the world," TIA said in a statement.

The move means local researchers will have access to more than 2,300 existing patents as well as related knowledge on diseases including malaria and TB, which kills 1,500 people daily, 10% of the deaths being children.

The patent pool - the voluntary pulling together of identified classes of patents or classes of technology to third parties on agreed standard conditions - was announced by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in March 2009. Alnylam, a biopharmaceutical company headquartered in US, joined the pool in July last year.

Melinda Moree, Chief Executive of the BIO Ventures for Global Health, said although MIT was the first university to contribute to the pool, the Emory Institute for Drug Discovery had also announced it was joining. Moree's non-profit organisation took over administering the pool in January to promote its independence from the giant pharmaceutical company.

Emory is using the patents and know-how available in the pool to work on a tuberculosis project with GSK and South African based iThemba Pharmaceuticals, a drug company partly funded by the South African government's innovation agency.

"Together with Alnylam and GSK, we revised the pool principles to make them easier for universities to contribute," Moree told University World News.

MIT's joining is expected to attract other universities and academics working on the research and platform technologies necessary to fight neglected diseases as contributors and users. Moree confirmed that other universities had expressed considerable interest and were expected to join soon.

"We hope the addition of MIT as a contributor of patents to the pool will inspire other universities to think about how their research or platform technologies can be used for global health and to join for the common good," she added.

The pool facilitates access to products, technologies and product development expertise for organisations that want to conduct research on treatments for neglected diseases. It is accessible to industry and third parties, including academic researchers and, potentially, funding agencies, to deliver real benefits for patients in least-developed countries.

Universities using the pool's resources would have access to valuable new technologies such as the RNAi platform that Alnylam has contributed, as well as the industry expertise that resides within companies such as GSK.

"Universities from developing countries are welcome to join the pool as either users or contributors, as long as they are able to adhere to the core principles set by the pool partners," Moree said. The core principles include royalty-free sales to least developed countries.

She explained the pool was a dynamic mechanism to ensure universities' often-ground-breaking new technologies could be used for research efforts on neglected tropical diseases in the world's least developed countries. Universities could see their research benefited the development of new drugs for neglected diseases.

Also, participating universities could possibly use the pool's resources to reduce transaction time and costs, and increase the efficiency and speed of the development of medicines for neglected tropical diseases.

"The most important criterion for universities to be part of the pool is the wish to improve the health of the poor around the world, and to aid in the development of new medicines for diseases with little or no commercial market," she said.

Requests to access the pool would be considered on the relevance of the pool's assets to the problem to be solved and the requestor demonstrating it could make use of the knowledge, Moree explained.

"We hope that MIT's contributions will be an example to their peers in academia, just as the Emory Institute of Drug Discovery was an important milestone for academia benefiting from the pool."

The pool's mission is to motivate innovative and efficient drug discovery and development by opening access to intellectual property in neglected tropical disease research: "We need academic involvement to fulfill this mission," Moree said.