Life Sciences
Navigate forward to interact with the calendar and select a date. Press the question mark key to get the keyboard shortcuts for changing dates.
Navigate backward to interact with the calendar and select a date. Press the question mark key to get the keyboard shortcuts for changing dates.
Innovation is essential to promoting human health, agricultural productivity, and ecological sustainability. ITIF’s Center for Life Sciences Innovation conducts research supporting advances in human biotechnology; pharmaceuticals; and health care policy outside the realm of IT.
Featured
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.
More Publications and Events
September 14, 2023|Events
Innovation and Competitiveness: GTIPA Summit, 2023
Join members of the Global Trade and Innovation Policy Alliance (GTIPA) for a series of expert panel discussions on technology and innovation policy. Topics will include the keys to subnational innovation competitiveness in Europe and South America, optimal ways to stimulate life sciences innovation, how digital technologies can drive decarbonization, and the possibilities for reimaging value chains in the global trading system.
September 5, 2023|Reports & Briefings
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.
August 30, 2023|Blogs
White House Names the First 10 Drugs Up for Medicare Price Negotiations; Misguided Attempt to Control Drug Prices Only Hurts Patients Long-Term
The IRA Medicare drug negotiations represent a poorly crafted policy with many direct and unintended consequences for biopharmaceutical innovation. Rather, this short-term win for government drug price-setting advocates will likely lead to long-term harms that patients will feel for decades.
August 22, 2023|Presentations
Seizing the Transformative Opportunity of Multi-cancer Early Detection
Stephen Ezell gave a presentation on “Seizing the Transformative Opportunity of Multi-cancer Early Detection” at the 15th Annual Next Generation Dx Summit in Washington, DC on August 22, 2023.
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.”
April 4, 2023|Events
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 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.
March 24, 2023|Events
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.