Researchers in the biopharma industry are bringing us closer to the scientific solutions we need to end this pandemic.
Pfizer and Moderna recently unveiled their preliminary Phase 3 clinical trial data for their potential COVID-19 vaccines, showing them to be more than 90 percent effective. Britain began to administer the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine December 8th.
Other vaccine developers are not far behind. Sanofi, Johnson & Johnson, and Novavax are also making incredible progress.
Biopharmaceutical researchers have undertaken an unprecedented campaign to find vaccines and new treatments to combat COVID-19 as quickly as possible. Their success is a lifeline to the millions of Americans affected by this pandemic.
One reason for this unparalleled response? Strong intellectual property protection for innovators. These protections are the foundation of America’s vibrant innovation ecosystem and help to deliver new waves of life-saving therapies — including those to treat and combat COVID-19.
It usually takes years to bring a new drug or vaccine through the R&D pipeline. Yet today, less than one year after the novel coronavirus appeared, we have more than 750 unique compounds in development to combat the disease. Close to 100 of those compounds are in the final stages of development.
American researchers lead the world in this innovation. When it comes to all vaccines and therapeutics to fight COVID-19, more than half of the projects underway originate within the United States. That is more than the rest of the world combined.
These treatments and vaccines will benefit patients here at home and around the globe for years to come.
We cannot take this progress for granted. Medical innovation is difficult and risky. Scientists usually examine and test thousands of potential molecules to find even one viable candidate.
Even then, the odds of successfully bringing that candidate through clinical trials, regulatory approval and to patients are incredibly small. Only one in eight drugs entering clinical trials are ultimately approved for public use.
Our country has spent decades fostering an ecosystem that rewards this type of risk taking. But proposals to undercut this system will cause the drug development pipeline to run dry, eliminating hope for future cures and therapies.
There have long been attempts to weaken intellectual property protections for drug innovators, and those efforts are now being used against those working to develop COVID-19 vaccines and therapies.
Some countries are pushing for the ability to remove patent protections from COVID-19 vaccines so they can “be more accessible and affordable” for less developed countries. Even others are calling for richer nations like the U.S. to adopt similar policies to make COVID-19 vaccines “affordable.”
The plan is to leverage global “compulsory licensing” laws, which would allow countries to revoke an innovator’s patents and then license those patents to the innovator’s foreign or domestic competitors.
A handful of governments have made it a habit of issuing compulsory licenses on products, and it is telling that these efforts are now underway before a vaccine has even been successfully developed.
Confiscating the intellectual property of biopharmaceutical innovators will only undermine researchers’ efforts to combat COVID-19, cancer, and other deadly ailments.
While we share the concern that these medicines must be available to communities around the globe, including the most vulnerable, low-income communities, going down this road is unnecessary and would do more harm than good.
For example, many of the vaccines meant to protect against COVID-19 are extremely complex and powerful biologic products with complicated manufacturing processes.
There are legitimate questions as to whether these countries could replicate the vaccine in way that was both safe and efficient, and these separate development processes would take additional testing and time that the world currently does not have the luxury of giving.
Even more important, biopharmaceutical researchers are already working to ensure vaccines and treatments necessary to end the pandemic are accessible and affordable to those around the world who need them.
Companies are engaging in unprecedented collaboration with each other, governments and nongovernmental partners to provide global access to these lifesaving medicines at incredibly reasonable pricing — typically no more than the average flu vaccine.
And they are accomplishing all this collaboration voluntarily — without government coercion — and while still respecting and maintaining critical intellectual property protections.
The biopharmaceutical industry’s response to COVID-19 has demonstrated how science and modern medicine can save and improve lives. We should be heralding and protecting these scientists and researchers — especially during a global pandemic.
Failing to do so may mean patients never see the true end of this current pandemic or the next one, or any of tomorrow’s much-needed groundbreaking therapies for a host of other serious and deadly diseases.
