LSIPR 50 2016: James Love
Name: James Love
Organisation: Knowledge Ecology International
Position: Director
James Love is the director of Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), a non-governmental organisation. During his career he has advised UN agencies, national governments, public health non-governmental organisations and regional intergovernmental organisations.
KEI was founded in 2006 to carry on earlier work done by the Center for Study of Responsive Law and Essential Information, where Love worked from 1990 to 2006. The same year that KEI was founded, he received a MacArthur Award for creative and effective institutions for his work on a UN treaty on copyright exemptions for people who are disabled or blind.
"I played an important role in ending the monopoly on drugs for HIV/AIDS in many developing countries. This led to a vast expansion in the number of people being treated."
In February 2016, Love published a blog on the KEI website in which he said that he attended a meeting of the Equitable Access Initiative (EAI), a multi-stakeholder initiative which is considering new ways of measuring various countries’ health needs and capacities as they develop.
EAI works in partnership with the World Bank, UNICEF and the World Health Organization.
As a member of the expert panel at the EAI, Love argued that the World Bank, which provides loans for developing countries through capital programmes, is outdated. He discussed that the categories for measuring income are a problem, as classing countries as having ‘middle’ or ‘high’ income leads to a hardening of attitudes about inter partes review policies and less generous aid policies. He said that this classification system continues to be misused to the detriment of those countries.
He spoke to LSIPR to explain more about his work.
What does your role entail?
KEI is involved in research and advocacy on behalf of the public on matters involving the production, management and governance of knowledge. Much of our work focuses on intellectual property rights, and/or models of funding innovation.
What is your biggest achievement to date?
I played an important role in ending the monopoly on drugs for HIV/AIDS in many developing countries. This led to a vast expansion in the number of people being treated.
What was the biggest challenge while working towards this?
We had to create the political, legal and business environment where it was possible to scale up production of generic drugs.
"There is simply no way you can use the promise of monopolies and high drug prices to induce investments in R&D and then expect to have equitable and universal access to the products."
How did you overcome it?
Our first task was to stop the US government from pressuring developing countries over drug patents. While this was not fully accomplished, the US did change enough to allow us to challenge patent monopolies on HIV/AIDS drugs in several countries, including in particular the countries where most people with HIV/AIDS lived.
I began by documenting the extent of US trade pressures and engaging US officials on the policies. The dramatic changes in US trade policy took place when HIV/AIDS activists directly confronted Vice President Al Gore, who was running for president in 2000. There were a series of negotiations in multilateral institutions to establish broader acceptance of the use of compulsory licensing of drug patents, including the adoption in the World Health Assembly of a resolution dealing with intellectual property and healthcare, the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health in 2001, and the later adoption of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) development.
Collectively, these created norms within the World Health Organization, the WTO and WIPO that favoured patient interests. But this was not enough, it was necessary to negotiate the first $1 per day price for an effective HIV/AIDS cocktail, and to work with about a dozen countries in Africa and other countries in Asia and Latin America to grant compulsory licences on patents, including most importantly the 2003 Hazel/Tau/TAC case on excessive prices on several AIDS drugs.
In 2002, I proposed the creation of what would later become the Medicines Patents Pool, which would eventually secure voluntary licences for a large number of very good drugs for HIV, HBV and HCV.
Which individual in the life sciences field has been most influential in your work?
Tim Hubbard, a professor of bioinformatics at King's College London, head of bioinformatics at Genomics England, and honorary faculty at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK.
What do you consider to be the biggest challenge in your field today?
The ‘delinkage’ of the costs of research and development (R&D) from the prices of drugs, vaccines and certain other medical technologies. There is simply no way you can use the promise of monopolies and high drug prices to induce investments in R&D and then expect to have equitable and universal access to the products. High prices are the enemy of access and the enemy of fairness.
Delinkage reforms can be implemented progressively, and we can begin right now. It is actually easier to implement delinkage of R&D costs from prices for drugs and vaccines than for any other sector of the economy, because we already have systems of third parties providing pooled insurance and valuing and rewarding innovation.
What do you hope your next achievement will be?
The elimination of monopolies on all new drugs and vaccines worldwide.
Do you have any advice for anyone looking to break into your field?
Don’t obsess over short-term goals. Although it is absolutely necessary to build coalitions and work constructively with others, be wary of groupthink. Loyalty and trust are undervalued virtues. Don’t spend much of your time on projects that have no chance of success, or that are not actually important.
