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Intellectual Property And “The Lost Year” Of Covid-19 Deaths, Madhavi Sunder, Haochen Sun

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Protecting intellectual property (IP) is a question of life and death. COVID-19 vaccines, partially incentivized by IP, are estimated to have saved nearly 20 million lives worldwide during the first year of their availability in 2021. However, most of the benefits of this life-saving technology went to high- and upper-middle-income countries. Despite 10 billion vaccines being produced by the end of 2021, only 4 percent of people in low-income countries were fully vaccinated. Paradoxically, IP may also be partly responsible for hundreds of thousands of lives lost in 2021, due to an insufficient supply of vaccines and inequitable access during …

On The Appeal Of Drug Patent Challenges, Charles Duan

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Administrative patent challenge proceedings, the most prominent form of which is inter partes review, have attracted much controversy. In particular, the pharmaceutical industry and its supporters have criticized the proceedings as unfairly biased toward canceling valuable drug patents. Yet there has been little study of the real-world, practical impact of these administrative proceedings on drug patents or pharmaceutical markets.

This Article reviews the universe of administrative challenges on drug patents that have proceeded through appeal to the Federal Circuit. The majority of patents challenged this way are deemed unpatentable at both the agency and appellate levels, and, that administrative cancellation …