Pools solve for pharma best

Patent pools have many benefits that can be translated into the public health and pharmaceutical sphere. Stated benefits of pools include their procompetitive nature through integration of complementary technologies, the reductions of transaction costs, clearing innovative roadblocks, and increasing the widespread sharing of technologies.115 Patent pools show their efficiency and effectiveness when “multiple patented technologies are needed to produce a standardized product . . . . [These pools] are generally recognized as mitigating the ‘holdup’ and ‘holdout’ problems that can sometimes stymie industry efforts to make a product that conforms to an industry standard.”116

Critics of patent pools note different concerns, mostly related to competition and antitrust laws. Such concerns include “distortion of competition caused by pooling competing patents.”117 While there is an inextricable tie to antitrust law and the possibility of antitrust violations with patent pools, there is unlikely to be an “anticompetitive effect[] unless (1) excluded firms cannot effectively compete in the relevant market for the good incorporating the licensed technologies and (2) the pool participants collectively possess market power.”118

Although creating patent pools raises concerns of incentive and ownership over intellectual property innovations, patent pools allow for sharing of essential knowledge while still upholding intellectual property protections.119 Patent pools can be created, and even made mandatory in times of public need, by the creation of “a system of compulsory patent pooling and licensing [that] . . . include[s] express suspension of any regulatory marketing exclusivity while ensuring that actual production remains dependent on demonstrating compliance with good manufacturing practice.”120