tisiwoota

Newest update on the Brazil patent-breaking saga: the Brazilian health minister has announced intentions to authorize generic production of the anti-retroviral Kaletra by July 6th unless Abbott, the patent owner, voluntary agrees to slash prices on its own.

Relatedly, I should pass along the observation from CP Tech’s IP-health listserv that there appears to be a widespread misconception that there are no precedents for putting AIDS drugs under compulsory license. As a list from CP Tech shows, compulsory licenses for anti-retrovirals have been issued in Mozambique, Zambia, Malaysia, Indonesia and South Africa. While the Brazil case will have significant ripples for other countries hoping to improve access to essential medicines, it’s important to emphasize that the practice of issuing compulsory licenses based on government discretion (rather than strictly in “emergency” circumstances) is not only legal in theory but is also supported by actual precedent in a number of countries.

In reading this article about a $14.8 million grant awarded by the Gates Foundation to an Arizona researcher trying to create an oral vaccine for bacterial pneumonia, I learned something I didn’t know about vaccine development– namely that the process for approving a vaccine for infant can take quite a long time “because the vaccine first is tested on adults, and if those are successful, then it is tested on a younger group each time until it reaches the infant category.”

It’s certainly reassuring to hear that the process is that thorough– but it also gives me a greater appreciation of the investment required to bring a new vaccine to market. The article also underscores the lack of sufficient incentives in the free market to develop many essential medicines:

“Large for-profit pharmaceutical companies are reluctant to get into the vaccine business because they can’t make as much money on a vaccine that only gets used by a person twice in their lifetime.”

The project is among 43 winners chosen by the Gates Foundation to receive five year grants of up to $20 million (a sum, it is worth pointing out, that is significantly larger than most NIH grants):

“…the 14 goals that the foundation wanted scientists to pursue included: vaccines that need no refrigeration and can be given without needles; vaccines that create immunity with one dose and are safe for newborns; new ways to kill or cripple mosquitoes; more nutritious staple crops; better animal models for human diseases; blood tests that can be done in villages without electricity; and new ways to attack diseases like tuberculosis and hepatitis when they are dormant.”

And the intellectual property angle?

“As part of receiving a grant, the researchers are allowed to patent anything they invent, but they must guarantee that it will be made available to poor countries at low cost or free.”

These terms are identical to what the WHO generally stipulates in contracts with its collaborators– and in contrast, the Times article notes, to patent rights resulting from work associated with NIH grants– which “normally go to the university involved” without requirements to offer preferential access to developing countries.

The First Dream

The Wind is ghosting around the house tonight
and as I lean against the door of sleep
I begin to think about the first person to dream,
how quiet he must have seemed the next morning

as the others stood around the fire
draped in the skins of animals
talking to each other only in vowels,
for this was long before the invention of consonants.

He might have gone off by himself to sit
on a rock and look into the mist of a lake
as he tried to tell himself what had happened,
how he had gone somewhere without going,

how he had put his arms around the neck
of a beast that the others could touch
only after they had killed it with stones,
how he felt its breath on his bare neck.

Then again, the first dream could have come
to a woman, though she would behave,
I suppose, much the same way,
moving off by herself to be alone near water,

except that the curve of her young shoulders
and the tilt of her downcast head
would make her appear to be terribly alone,
and if you were there to notice this,

you might have gone down as the first person
to ever fall in love with the sadness of another.

The Pew Global Attitudes Project is series of worldwide opinion surveys, comprising over 90,000 interviews in 50 countries. I encourage you to check it out; the findings are quite fascinating…

(more…)

A review of a newly-filed patent for web-ranking reveals some interesting aspects of Google’s methodology to queue the good and cut the spam– For example:

How many years did you register your domain name for?
If it was only one then Google could hold that against you.

Why?

Because the majority of Spam websites only register a domain name for one year. A domain name registered for a longer period implies that the owner is more likely to be legitimate and serious about their web site.

Also:

Sites can be ranked seasonally. A ski site may rank higher in the winter than in the summer. Google can monitor and rank pages by recording CTR changes by season.

[And much more…]

There have been a number of articles in the news recently about China’s censorship of bloggers who [attempt to] write about democracy or human rights– In particular, Microsoft has come under fire for facilitating China’s censorship efforts by setting certain words [eg, “freedom”, “democracy”] as triggers for a disabling error message.*

Today I learned of a wiki project that coordinates “adoption” of Chinese blogs through web-hosting by volunteer bloggers:

This is how it works. A blog (or any website, really) using an independent hosting service hosts a blocked blog. (This simply means creating a subdirectory where the adopted blog can be published and store its files.) The host blog should not have a significant readership in the country where the adopted blog is blocked, because the host blog is running a (small) risk of being blocked in that country.

…By distributing the blocked blogs across a variety of hosts, the task of blocking a large number of blogs becomes increasingly difficult. If any adopted blog is blocked, it can say its thank yous and farewells to its host and then move onto a new host.

I’m not exactly sure why hosting is necessary, seeing as there are quite a few free services out there… Do those tend to be blocked? Can someone explain why such an adoption system is necessary?

…

* Iran has also tightened its internet controls– and interestingly, both countries’ repressive tactics seem limited in effectiveness only to their respective native languages. For example:

Anti-censorship activists have found that if a user creates the blog in English, it bypasses such filtering, even if it is later switched to Chinese.

…

** Also of interest: Reporters without Borders has released a list of the best blogs defending freedom of expression– definitely worth taking a look at. Some of the authors face imprisonment or other threats for their writing.

An editorial about Google’s new patented algorithm for sorting news searches by “quality”.

A good editorial in the Washington Post in favor of changing intellectual property policies to improve access to medicine for poor countries:

Little by little, the world is coming around to two self-evidently good proposals to improve global health. But there’s a third, equally great proposal to which nobody pays attention… Oddly, the two proposals with momentum are the ones that cost a lot. The first is designed to stimulate production of vaccines for diseases such as polio, yellow fever and hepatitis B… The second proposal is about drugs that don’t exist yet — for example, a malaria vaccine.

…So there’s an appetite to spend taxpayers’ money on buying existing vaccines and on a “pull mechanism” for new ones. But there’s a third challenge in this medical battlefield: How to make drugs that have been invented for rich countries available in the poor world.

Excerpt from a biography of Vera Nabokov:

Vera Nabokov attended every one of her husband’s classroom lectures; and Vladimir’s students came up with various speculations as to the reason:

* Mrs. Nabokov was there to remind us we were in the presence of greatness, and should not abuse that privilege with our inattention.

* Nabokov had a heart condition, and she was at hand with a phial of medicine to jump up at a moment’s notice.

* That wasn’t his wife, that was his mother.

* She was there because Nabokov was allergic to chalk dust, and because he didn’t like his handwriting.

* To shoo away the coeds.

* Because she was his encyclopedia, if he ever forgot anything.

* Because he had no idea what was going to come out of his mouth– and no memory of it after he did– so she had to write it all down so that he would remember what to ask on exams.

* He was blind, and she was his Seeing Eye dog, which explained why they always arrived arm in arm.

* She was intended as living proof that he had a fan club.

* She graded his performance, in order to review it with him in the evenings.

* She had a gun in her purse, and was there to defend him.

* We all knew that she was a ventriloquist.

“In a closely watched patent case, the Supreme Court on Monday gave drug companies broad leeway to use other companies’ patented compounds in their own research, even at the earliest stages of new drug development.

‘For drug innovators and patients, this is enormous good news,’ said E. Joshua Rosenkranz, a partner at New York’s Heller Ehrman who argued the case for Merck. ‘It means that researchers will not have to sit on their hands for a decade when they have discovered a promising drug, but rather, without skipping a beat, can conduct the experiments they need to conduct to make sure the drug gets to sick patients as soon after patent expiration as possible.’”

FIRE AND ICE

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate

To know that for destruction ice
Is also great

And would suffice.