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Center for Life Sciences Innovation

Center for Life Sciences Innovation

ITIF’s Center for Life Sciences Innovation advocates for accelerating biopharmaceutical innovation by recognizing that the public and private sectors both have essential roles to play. The Center’s mission is to study and advance the many technology, economic, and policy factors underpinning successful life sciences innovation—from how new technologies like artificial intelligence, genomics, and gene editing are powering the next generation of biomedical innovation to the economics of life sciences innovation, including the role of IP and incentives therein; international competitiveness in life sciences innovation; and foremost the optimal set of public policies, at home and abroad, to spur greater levels of much-needed biopharmaceutical innovation.

Featured Publications

How Skeptics Misconstrue the Link Between Drug Prices and Innovation

How Skeptics Misconstrue the Link Between Drug Prices and Innovation

A recent article in the British Medical Journal contends “high drug prices” are neither necessary nor justified to sustain biopharmaceutical innovation. But it misrepresents and misinterprets the facts, highlighting how faulty the rationale is for drug price controls.

The Hidden Toll of Drug Price Controls: Fewer New Treatments and Higher Medical Costs for the World

The Hidden Toll of Drug Price Controls: Fewer New Treatments and Higher Medical Costs for the World

When nations implement pharmaceutical price controls, they reduce pharmaceutical revenues, which then reduces investments in further R&D, limiting future generations’ access to new novel treatments needed to fight diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, and diabetes.

The Economics of Biopharmaceutical Innovation: Symposium Report

The Economics of Biopharmaceutical Innovation: Symposium Report

Investments in biopharmaceutical innovation and expenditures on medicines themselves both produce tremendous societal returns. Maintaining the robust innovation ecosystem necessary to capitalize on these benefits requires the right mix of “push” and “pull” incentives.

How Japan Squandered Its Biopharmaceutical Competitiveness: A Cautionary Tale

How Japan Squandered Its Biopharmaceutical Competitiveness: A Cautionary Tale

Stringent drug price controls have significantly hampered the competitive and innovative capacity of Japan’s biopharmaceutical industry in recent decades, serving as a warning for U.S. policymakers considering introducing Medicare Part D drug price controls in 2022.

Testimony to the Senate Finance Committee on “Prescription Drug Price Inflation”

Testimony to the Senate Finance Committee on “Prescription Drug Price Inflation”

Expenditures for retail prescriptions have been roughly stable for the past two decades as a share of total U.S. health-care expenditures. Instead of applying broad price controls, policymakers should promote affordability and mitigate out-of-pocket costs for individuals.

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Events

April 4, 2023

Lessons From the Rise and Fall of Japan’s Life-Sciences Innovation Ecosystem

Tune in for an expert panel discussion examining where Japan faltered in this sector, what it must do to restore its life-sciences innovation leadership and competitiveness, why that would be in the best interests of both Japan and the United States—and what America must do to avoid following in Japan’s footsteps.

March 24, 2023

Preserving a Virtuous Cycle: The Economics of Biopharmaceutical Innovation

Watch the release event of a new report that examines the dynamics that underpin the economics of biopharmaceutical innovation and how to maintain a supportive environment that keeps the United States in the lead of life-sciences innovation.

March 29, 2022

How Using March-in Rights Would Threaten America’s Research Universities

ITIF hosted a panel discussion with leading experts on innovation policy, technology transfer, and business, who spoke to the practical implications of exercising federal “march-in” rights and why it would be a grave and ill-timed mistake for the U.S. health, competitiveness, and research landscape.

April 29, 2021

How Intellectual Property Has Played a Pivotal Role in the Global COVID-19 Response

ITIF hosted an expert panel discussion about the report and the vital role IP has played throughout the pandemic.

April 21, 2021

Seizing the Transformative Opportunity of Multi-cancer Early Detection

ITIF hosted an expert panel discussion exploring the groundbreaking innovations and policy considerations impacting the field of multi-cancer early detection.

More Events

Staff

StephenStephen Ezell

Vice President, Global Innovation Policy, and Director, Center for Life Sciences Innovation

Advisors

BillBill Andresen

Associate Vice President for Federal Affairs, University of Pennsylvania

DavidDavid Beier

Managing Director, Bay City Capital

AndreiAndrei Iancu

Partner, Irell & Manella, LLP

Frank R.Frank R. Lichtenberg

Cain Brothers & Company Professor of Healthcare, Columbia University Graduate School of Business

CatherineCatherine Marinac

Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School

GaryGary Puckrein

Founding President and CEO, National Minority Quality Forum

More From the Center

August 21, 2023|Reports & Briefings

Preserving US Biopharma Leadership: Why Small, Research-Intensive Firms Matter in the US Innovation Ecosystem

America is home to 85 percent of the world’s small, research-intensive biopharma firms. These start-ups are critical to drug development and U.S. competitiveness. Congress should make targeted changes to tax policy to incentivize them and maintain U.S. biopharma leadership.

August 18, 2023|Testimonies & Filings

Comments to the National Institutes of Health on “Maximizing NIH’s Levers to Catalyze Technology Transfer”

The technology-transfer regime the United States has implemented over the past four decades, largely as enabled through the Bayh-Dole Act, has been tremendously effective in stimulating innovation, especially in the life sciences. While all such processes should be continuously streamlined or tweaked where improvement is possible, the current system does not need serious modification or reform.

July 10, 2023|Testimonies & Filings

Comments Before the US Senate Help Committee Regarding the “Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act”

Recognizing the long history of failed efforts to include reasonable pricing clauses in NIH licensing activities, policymakers should reject provisions in the PAHPA Act that would cap the U.S. cost of any products resulting from federal funding “at the lowest price among G7 countries” and do so “at a reasonable price.”

March 30, 2023|Testimonies & Filings

Testimony to the US International Trade Commission Regarding COVID-19 Diagnostics and Therapeutics: Supply, Demand, and TRIPS Agreement Flexibilities

A TRIPS IPR waiver for COVID-19 diagnostics and therapeutics is unnecessary, unwarranted, and even counterproductive—just as it was for COVID-19 vaccines.

January 25, 2023|Reports & Briefings

How Off-Label Use of Medicines Drives Health-Care Use and Disability

Peer-reviewed research finds that pharmaceutical innovation provides direct and indirect benefits for health-care use and disability.

August 5, 2022|Blogs

Senate Reconciliation Legislation Fails to Reconcile the Interests of Biomedical Innovation and Drug Price Affordability

The bill fails to recognize three critical realities: 1) that drug prices are, in fact, not a significant driver of raging inflation; 2) that there exist better mechanisms to reform Medicare Part D drug pricing practices; 3) that mandated government price controls do inflict serious harm on nations’ life-sciences innovation systems.

July 8, 2022|Blogs

Senate Democrats’ Drug Price Proposal Would Slow the Pace of New Drug Discovery

Congress should ignore pressure from progressive activists who want to use drug price controls to move to a government-led drug discovery and production system and instead focus on more pragmatic reforms.

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