IP, Patents May Set The Tone For The Next Battleground

In a knowledge-intense world, science plays a larger role than trade and commerce. But tied with the commercial perspective, science and engineering have undergone a sea change and we are now looking at innovations that offer great business value and mostly focus on enhancing economy and trade. This has led to a huge and significant change in the global science roadmap and technology-related economic activities, especially in the wake of severe economic downturn in the recent past, with its effects threatening to blow the countries apart.

Intensive research, which started as a pure science activity and a fundamental extension of academic studies, has now taken the backseat. While this has caused enough worries and heartaches within the scientific community that believes in research for research’s sake, the business angle is forcing the fraternity to look at research as an activity that has to be justified and feasible in economic terms. Nowadays, what matters most is applied research, innovated further to ensure end commercial gains and patented to protect its intellectual value from duplication.

According to a recent report by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the US and China are leading the intellectual property space as they happen to be the driving forces behind international patent filing in a record-setting year in 2013.

The total number of filings under WIPO stood at 205,300, up 5% from the year before. And, what’s noteworthy is that while USA and China are almost close in their race for Patent Cooperation Treaty, India emerges as a surprise third, being one of the largest user of the PCT system among low and middle-income countries.

With Obamacare coming into focus this year, the US has come under severe pressure to restrict pharma patents from being used by other countries. As of now, the Obama administration has withstood a great deal of pressure from the US business lobby. They somehow contained the situation from turning into another diplomatic embarrassment for both Washington and New Delhi. The US has kept India in its ‘priority watch list’ for the current year instead of further downgrading the country and categorising it as a ‘priority foreign country,’ which would have led to trade sanctions.

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Needless to say, such discord mainly arises from economy-centred issues. Interestingly, the knowledge monopoly of the western countries is slowly fading and traditional knowledge-based countries such as India and China (mostly Asian nations) are vying for the top slot. Although the US remains among the top nations, with knowledge and technology-intensive industries to its credit, including some highly specific energy and pharmaceutical manufacturing, emerging economies are clearly giving it some tough competition.

Emerging economies understand the role science and innovation play in the global marketplace and also in ensuring economic competitiveness. For them, the vision has slowly changed from being body shops to innovators. And ‘trade’ may soon become the next keyword instead of ‘aid.’

While the US remains the single biggest investor in research and development, the annual global research spending in the country has significantly dropped from 37% to 30% in the recent years. That is why the country is slowly training its gun on nations such as India, which are among the biggest PCT consumers. Earlier this year, the US looked all set to announce trade enforcement action against India, as the US government was under growing pressure from pharma research firms and manufacturers to react to the perceived intellectual property rights abuses by Indian drug companies.

One simple reason for this is the stern stance that the Indian judiciary has taken in major cases of patent protection of life-saving cancer drugs, keeping them largely affordable to the Indian middle-class and the lower middle-class. Novartis’ drug Glivec didn’t get patent cover by the Supreme Court and a compulsory licence was given to Bayer’s drug that treats kidney and liver cancer.

Even in the past, India had played a crucial role and drastically slashed the prices of ARV (antiretroviral) drugs in its war against HIV. This was more than a decade ago and since then, the country has been able to bring down the cost of the drug from $15,000 per patient per year to $60 per patient per year. It was an essential social initiative to keep the incidence of HIV down although India is not one of the highly affected countries. But the initiative has set the path for others. India was able to do this owing to the fact that the country didn’t root for WTO patents protection, which would have posed a hurdle in economising ARV drugs.

India’s role in pharma wars has great implications when it comes to underprivileged people’s access to quality healthcare. Countries like Brazil and South Africa have closely followed the Indian model to modify their IP laws, sending out alarming signals to knowledge-hoarding countries.

India, the world’s largest producer and supplier of generic drugs, has often been singled out by the US government and the multinational pharma industry on the grounds of insufficient enforcement of intellectual property protection.

For India, keeping the knowledge free and open for sharing, especially when it comes to saving lives, seems to have become a philosophy by which the country lives. And the rest is for the countries to slug it out in courts.