Life Sciences

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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

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.