Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM)
"As members of these institutions of higher learning, we believe that universities have an opportunity and a responsibility to improve global access to public health goods--particularly those they have helped develop"
Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM) is a group composed of students, faculty, and researchers at many universities in the US, Canada and the UK. By confronting universities, referred to as the “modern engines of basic science research”, they aim to step up to both the access gap and the research gap.
Universities are known to conduct a large proportion of the pharmaceutical research that goes on. They have sold the rights for drugs such as Xalatan, a glaucoma drug invented at Colombia University, as well as antiretroviral drugs for HIV such as stavudine (or d4T, Yale University), abacavir (University of Minnesota), lamivudine (Emory University) and enfuviritide (Duke University).
In recognition of drugs as a public good and also of public institutions’ duty to society, UAEM exerts pressure on universities to consider their effect on low-income populations.
As UAEM mention, the high prices for drugs resulting from patent-created monopolies on their sale, combined with the lack of sufficient research being conducted on drugs for diseases prevalent in low-income countries means people in poor countries suffer on two accounts. The strategies they use are as follows:
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Members of UAEM are trying to convince universities to adopt the Equitable Access License (EAL) as part of their intellectual property policies. The EAL relies on generic competition as the lynchpin for ensuring affordable medicines become available in the places they are needed most. Generic competition is recognised as being one of the most effective ways of combating market monopolies for drugs. Universities are encouraged to be proactive in their activities, by agreeing to allow generic production of a drug to sell in low- and middle-income (LMI) countries before the drug is even completely developed. Since medicines are usually developed under more than one patent, all technologies associated with the end product, such as patents owned by the university and others, would be subject to this open license.
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