Xiaohongshu
UCL students call on the university to commit to universal access to COVID-19 related health technologies developed at UCL
To
Provost, Professor Michael Arthur,
Vice-Provost (Research), Professor David Price
Director of Research Strategy and Policy/Impact, Nicholas Tyndale
Director of Development, Angharad Milenkovic
As students, alumni and staff of UCL, we are writing to call attention to UCL’s important social responsibility in determining access to health technologies developed by UCL using both public funding and the direct donations to the Coronavirus Response Fund. This is based on our belief that everyone in the world, independent of socioeconomic status and place of residence, should have access to the vaccines, diagnostics, and medicines they need, especially during a global health crisis such as COVID-19.
Public funding, for example through the Medical Research Council (MRC), plays an important role in biomedical research conducted at UK universities. As members of universities we, therefore, have a responsibility to ensure a public return on these public investments. In the case of taxes, citizens have very little say in directing where their money goes. However, those who support UCL’s Coronavirus Response Fund in times of economic hardship have specifically directed their donations to research on COVID-19. These donors will expect that any resulting health technologies will be accessible, available, and affordable to all. Far too often we have seen research performed at universities, with public funding and public support, result in life-saving health technologies which, sadly, are then unaffordable and unavailable to many of the countries and individuals who need them most. This was famously the case for d4T, also known as stavudine, a vital component of antiretroviral combination therapy at the time developed at Yale University during the AIDS crisis. This drug was exclusively licensed by Yale to the pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb and became one of the first medicines developed in a university laboratory that came under scrutiny for its prohibitively high prices. The extortionate pricing of this drug, facilitated by monopoly and exclusivity, barred access to antiretroviral therapy for an estimated 95% of HIV-infected people in the developing world.
As London’s global university serving the global community, we believe that UCL, in particular, has an institutional responsibility to ensure widespread and global access when commercialising the COVID-19 research originating from our university. We are therefore pleased to see UCL’s support of Open Science (1) and Open Access through the UCL Press and UCL Discovery platforms. However, Open Access does not commit UCL to using licensing methods which encourage rapid or efficient access to healthcare technology, despite theoretically encouraging progress of research and development through open data.
Although Open Access initiatives are imperative for the rapid sharing of data and research results during this pandemic, UCL has currently not sufficiently nor specifically addressed the issues arising around the patenting and licensing of COVID-19 health technologies and their transfer to third parties, and the impact this may have on access to these biomedical innovations globally. Although we applaud UCL for publishing manufacturing instructions for the Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) UCL-Ventura Breathing Aid via their new online platform (2) dedicated to the “dissemination of technologies related to the fight against SARS-CoV-2”, we encourage UCL to take this initiative a step further and publicly commit to very clear and enforceable access and affordability conditions for all health technologies. Specifically, we urge UCL to publicly commit to the use of non-exclusive, royalty-free licensing of all COVID-19 related health technologies, existing and novel. The University of Oxford has previously committed to distributing non-exclusive, royalty-free licenses to its vaccine that is currently undergoing clinical trials (3).
UCL has made significant commitments to socially responsible licensing in the past. For instance, in 2013 UCL released a statement on the equitable dissemination of medical technologies (4) declaring that “our intellectual property should not become a barrier to essential health-related technologies needed by patients in developing countries” and that “early publication and wide dissemination of results will be encouraged to reduce opportunities for interfering patents”. Now is the time to act on these commitments and we urge you unequivocally uphold them,
We ask UCL to ensure affordable access globally and mitigate the risk of COVID-19-related health technologies being exploited for narrow commercial or political interests. UCL should therefore openly or non-exclusively license all COVID-19-related intellectual property, ensuring research benefits the highest number of people.
To this end, we demand that UCL:
1. Pledge publicly to provide full transparency regarding ongoing research into COVID-19. To meet this request, we ask UCL to making public:
a) information regarding the UCL Coronavirus Response fund including the amount raised, which projects are being funded, and any access and affordability conditions attached to that funding.
b) the results, including negative results, of any ongoing research at UCL related to COVID-19 as soon as they are available to encourage greater and more rapid research collaboration
2. Pledge publicly to act to promote open access to COVID-19 health technologies. To meet this request, we ask that UCL grant non-exclusive, royalty-free licenses for all COVID-19-relevant intellectual property. We encourage UCL to make a statement to that effect on the UCL website and an official press release. We particularly urge UCL to join other institutions and organisations across the world in adopting the Open COVID Pledge
3. Pledge publicly to promote transparency around licensing of intellectual property. To meet this request, we ask that UCL make public:
a) To which organisations UCL licenses COVID-19 related IP to.
b) The mechanisms attached to the licensing agreement which encourage transparency and affordable access. Where UCL licenses its work to other institutes, we ask them to ensure that these institutes also commit to full transparency and affordable access
Yours sincerely,
Students’ Union UCL
UCL BME Students’ Network
UCL Students for Global Health
UCL Friends of MSF
UCL Medics4Medics Society
UCL Dementia Research Society
UCL Cancer Charities Allied Society
UCL Anatomy Society
UCL MedTech Society
UCL African and Caribbean Medical Network
UCL Arab and North African Society
UCL Friends of Palestine Society
UCL African Caribbean Society
UCL Islamic Society
UCL Sign Language Society
UCL Somali Society
UCL Jewish Society
Supported by Universities Allied for Essential Medicines UK
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Footnotes:
- https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/open-science
- https://covid19research.uclb.com/
- https://innovation.ox.ac.uk/technologies-available/technology-licensing/expedited-access-covid-19-related-ip/?fbclid=IwAR2z4tlEIsyQZd5z-qI1sHoo-xILKTzaGrDDWjn_8ZdP0maAKkMuPd2hoXU
- Office of the Vice-Provost (Enterprise), “Statement of Principles and Strategies for the Equitable Dissemination of Medical Technologies” https://studylib.net/doc/11985041/office-of-the-vice-provost--enterprise---dissemination-of...#