Pills, Power, and Profits: The Dark Side of Big Pharma
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Developing medicines and vaccinations can be a time-consuming process and high-risk investment. Intellectual property offsets these limiting factors by providing pharmaceutical companies with legal power: the ability to restrict the sharing of confidential information and assert exclusivity over its patented inventions. This enables big pharmaceutical developers to reap high-rewards for their products. Sometimes these are life-saving medicines and therapeutics, but other times, they cause harm. In this panel talk, Professor Hawkins, Dr Oke and Dr McDonagh will explore how patent, copyright, trade mark and trade secret laws sustain the 'Dark Side of Big Pharma'. They also consider what can be done to bring forward the 'Bright Side' – both from within intellectual property law, but also whether the answer lies in the role of other intersecting regulatory regimes and laws like human rights.
About the speakers:
- Professor Naomi Hawkins teaches at the University of Sheffield, her research focuses on the intersection of intellectual property law and biomedical science. She was editor of Patenting Biotechnical Innovation: Eligibility, Ethics and Public Interest (2022).
- Dr Luke McDonagh is an Associate Professor at LSE Law School and author of the article False hope and fictitious patents: evaluating the intellectual property of OxyContin.
- Dr Emmanuel Oke is a Senior Lecturer in International Intellectual Property Law at the University of Edinburgh's Law School. He is author of the book Patents, Human Rights and Access to Medicines (2022).
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