Patents, Partnerships, and the Pre-Competitive Collaboration Myth in Pharmaceutical Innovation
Patents, Partnerships, and the Pre-Competitive Collaboration Myth in Pharmaceutical Innovation Liza S. Vertinsky* Public-private partnerships offer a promising alternative paradigm for pharmaceutical innovation in complex disease areas where there are both strong commercial interests and significant public need. They have the potential to reduce the tremendous waste associated with duplicative unsuccessful drug development efforts and to encourage the sharing of knowledge essential to accelerate pharmaceutical innovation. Patents threaten the potential of partnership strategies, however, by making it harder to sustain robust systems of knowledge sharing. Policymakers have tried to avoid this problem by focusing partnership strategies on areas deemed to be pre-competitive — areas of collaboration without competition and typically also without patents. This Article suggests that the current pre-competitive approach to partnership strategies in pharmaceutical innovation is fundamentally flawed for two reasons. First, it ignores the competitive market pressures that both shape what is deemed to be pre-competitive and fuel tensions * Copyright © 2015 Liza S. Vertinsky. Associate Professor of Law, Emory University School of Law. Many thanks to Timothy Holbrook, Timothy Terrell, Yaniv Heled, Cynthia Ho, Kevin Outterson, and Michael Carroll, as well as Sean O’Connor, Roger Ford, Dan Burk, Mark McKenna, and other participants of the Yale Innovation Beyond IP conference 2014; Arti Rai, Jerome Reichman, Katherine Strandburg, Brett Frischmann, Michael Madison, Peter Lee, Margaret Chon, Sonali Shah, and the other participants in the Medical Commons Workshop at NYU in May 2014 and the 2nd Thematic Conference on the Knowledge Commons at NYU in September 2014; participants in the summer workshop at Georgia State College of Law in July 2014; participants of the Emory Faculty Colloquium; Simon Stern, Abraham Drassinower, Margaret J.
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