After the pandemic: found a drug agency instead of sacrificing patents

We owe the fact that we have a good chance today of overcoming the pandemic worldwide to a truly epoch-making scientific achievement.

And this achievement should also be respected in the debate about the corresponding vaccine patents, especially since a release will not bring the world closer to the goal of vaccinating more people in less time.

First of all: The modern mRNA vaccines from BioNTech / Pfizer, for example, are not the result of a stroke of luck, but the reward of years of intensive efforts: in public basic research, in state start-up and cluster funding and, above all, by far-sighted and courageous founders and investors. However, these high-quality vaccines are by no means sufficient to meet global demand as quickly as it would be necessary to quickly and permanently push back the pandemic. According to current forecasts, it will unfortunately take until next year to produce the required quantities - and by then they will still be a long way from reaching those willing to be vaccinated.

In this situation, the call for the release of patents or for compulsory licenses appears to be a simple solution to this pressing global problem. But that is too short-sighted. Because the bottleneck for the rapid availability of Covid vaccines is not the availability of knowledge, but rather the manufacturing capacities for vaccine production. In the past few months we have learned that building a new production facility takes six to nine months, even with the greatest possible commitment and under the best conditions. I am thinking, for example, of the commissioning of the new BioNTech / Pfizer plant in Marburg or the establishment of Moderna production at Lonza. The much-discussed delivery bottlenecks at AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson are also due to production problems.Without the production know-how, patents are of little use.

Expansion of production

The key is elsewhere. What really helps in the current situation are rather good incentives for the fastest and smoothest possible expansion of production, which also ensures the quality and thus the effectiveness of the vaccine. The global Covax initiative with EU participation is a new and important instrument for this. Covax acts as a buyer and with this demand stimulates production even for countries that cannot guarantee self-financing. In this way, the forces of the market are used to get Covid-19 vaccines available for as many countries as possible as soon as possible. It would therefore be advisable for states that are in the process of overcoming the pandemic to get even more involved there by donating excess doses,enable the best possible use of existing production capacities through the free movement of goods and support the development of further production capacities. The pandemic will best be overcome through the vaccine developers, not the deprivation of their rights.

Another aspect: one of the lessons learned from the pandemic is that we have to further strengthen our basic research into drugs and vaccines, improve the framework conditions for courageous founders and, last but not least, shorten the long way from finding promising active ingredients to effective and safe drugs . The way to a drug approval is very complex, very expensive and very risky - because until the market approval, the manufacturer does not know whether all the effort and costs have been invested in vain. In market economies, this path can therefore only be taken today by sufficiently financially strong companies who must have the certainty that they will be able to refinance the expenditure previously made on the market after approval.Given this background, a patent release would be highly counterproductive, especially for drugs that are in particularly high demand, and would also send the wrong signal with a view to the future. It would certainly diminish the courage to invest.

And yet the problem remains to be solved that far too few of the well-researched active ingredients actually make the leap to the product later, especially with regard to the prevention of future pandemics. This is precisely why we need an agency for the development of new drugs and therapeutic approaches in Germany and later in Europe. We have to lay the foundation before this legislative term.

The agency would start where the economic risk for companies is too great, although we all hope for the new drugs and vaccines. Just think of the development of reserve antibiotics. Such an agency would not only be able to significantly accelerate the availability of vaccines and drugs in the event of a pandemic. The agency would make the entrepreneurial risk for the company more calculable through its own commitment, but would also have an influence on the access regulations and pricing. This stimulates innovation and at the same time ensures fair use. If an emergency occurs, it has already been clarified in advance under which conditions a technology transfer is possible and what the pricing will look like.At the same time, the patent protection is secured and the trust of the developers as the basis for successful innovation is preserved. Such an agency would also make an important contribution to making Germany one of the world's pharmacies again.