Law Commons^™

Will Longer Antimicrobial Patents Improve Global Public Health?, Kevin Outterson

Faculty Scholarship

The problem of antimicrobial resistance has led some infectious disease experts and their professional societies to propose the use of transferable intellectual property rights (wildcard patents) and patent term extensions as methods to encourage antimicrobial R&D. We evaluate recent approvals of new antimicrobial classes and find the number of new introductions is higher than previously suggested. More importantly, creating new patent rights is shown to be an inefficient and possibly counterproductive response to antimicrobial resistance. Wildcard patents would operate as a more than US$40 billion annual tax on heart disease, hypertension, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, and depression to inefficiently …