Nature Medicine | Spoonful of Medicine

Q&A with Ellen ’t Hoen, head of the Medicines Patent Pool; “I hope to have licenses to produce drugs a year from now.”

By Asher Mullard In July, the global health financing mechanism UNITAID established an intellectual property–sharing scheme focused on scaling up access to new and lower-priced antiretroviral drugs in the developing world. The initiative—called the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP)—aims to streamline licensing processes, drive the combination of multiple HIV medicines into one pill and foster the development of drug formulations for children. In September, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) became the first contributor to the venture, licensing a suite of patents related to protease inhibitors that are used to treat HIV. The task of bringing drug firms and other 

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