That solves access and boosts WTO legitimacy-

One way to achieve better access to new medicines is patent pools, which allow third parties to acquire non-exclusive licences for the intellectual property needed to develop products. While patent pools have existed for several decades in other fields of technology, such as in digital technologies, they are a relatively new concept in public health, where they have been applied to address some of the access challenges in low- and middle-income countries.3

To improve access to antiretroviral treatment in low- and middle-income countries, Unitaid established the Medicines Patent Pool in 2010 as the first public health patent pool. Later, the patent pool’s mandate was expanded to treatments for tuberculosis and hepatitis C. The patent pool has negotiated most of the licensing agreements with pharmaceutical companies that have enabled competitive generic manufacture of antiretrovirals in low- and middle-income countries before patent expiry. These licences have also facilitated the development of new formulations that are particularly needed in resource-constrained settings, such as certain fixed-dose combinations and paediatric formulations. To date, the patent pool’s generic partners have distributed 22 million patient-years of treatment, allowing global savings of 1.06 billion United States dollars (US$), according to a biannual analysis undertaken by a leading auditing company.4

The patent pool’s model contributes to accelerating affordable access to new, improved treatments in low- and middle-income countries in partnership with the pharmaceutical industry. To achieve this goal in HIV, licensing arrangements for new medicines considered promising by WHO has sometimes been necessary before their inclusion in WHO’s model list, as in the case of dolutegravir. The patent pool signed a licensing agreement with a pharmaceutical company for dolutegravir in 2014. By the time the medicine was added to WHO’s model list in 2017, several patent pool sub-licensees had filed for approval of generic versions, including a new fixed-dose combination, with the WHO prequalification programme.