ABSTRACT
The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) is now more than a decade old, and countries are still struggling to reconcile TRIPS requirements with policy objectives on access to medicine. This chapter discusses four practical measures to enhance access to medical technologies, which include drugs, diagnostic tools, screening devices and non-drug therapies:
appropriate grounds for non-voluntary authorizations to use patents that express clear policy objectives, with TRIPS-compliant streamlined procedural rules;
guidelines for remuneration for non-voluntary authorizations, which increase transparency and predictability and are reasonably related to the policy objectives;
mechanisms for the collective management of intellectual property rights to better implement policies promoting access; and
management of the identification of relevant patents and elimination of inappropriate patent grants focusing on resources and incentives.
