For Immediate Release

Kim Cunningham, American Medical Student Association (AMSA), Phone: pr@amsa dot org

Ethan Guillen, Director, Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM)
ethan dot guillen@essentialmedicine dot org

ACTIVISTS APPLAUD SEN. MIKULSKI PUSH FOR AFFORDABLE SCREENING FOR WOMEN BUT ASK: WILL YOU SUPPORT AFFORDABLE TREATMENT WITH AN EFFECTIVE GENERIC BIOLOGICS PATHWAY?

Today, students from the American Medical Student Association (AMSA) and Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM) AffordableMedsNow.org campaign applauded the passage of an amendment by Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) that ensures affordable access to comprehensive preventative healthcare screenings for women. The groups ask, however, how the United States will be able to afford treatment of those discovered to have breast cancer given the extremely high costs of biologic medicines and specifically Herceptin, a breast cancer treatment which can cost as much as $48,000 per year?
Biologics are the fastest growing segment of the pharmaceutical market and on average cost 22 times the cost of conventional medicines. Current legislation contains a fake generic biologic drugs proposal that will actually block most price-lowering generic competition and access to affordable life-saving biologic medicines. (Learn more here: http://affordablemedsnow.org/index.php/learnmore/)

Current proposals contained in Senate and House healthcare reform legislation that purport to create a pathway to allow affordable biogenerics to come to market will in fact do the opposite, creating only the illusion of generic competition for most biologics. But if these proposals are improved in critical ways, they could save American consumers and taxpayers $71 billion or more in the first decade alone. Fixing this proposal with a more reasonable five years of exclusivity and by closing the evergreening loophole (with provisions such as those in HR 1427 and S 726) are common sense for a bill meant to stop the runaway growth of healthcare costs.

Will our Senators fight for access to affordable treatment as well as screening and push for a true pathway for affordable biologic medicines? AMSA and UAEM call upon the Senate to fight for access to affordable treatment as well as screening, and push for a true pathway for affordable biologic medicines.

###

About Universities Allied for Essential Medicines

Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM) is a coalition of students at over 50 top research institutions across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany. UAEM’s mission is to ensure that people in developing countries have access to medicines developed in universities and that university medical research addresses the needs of the majority of the world’s population. As an organization which values innovation, we work to empower students to find new ways to improve access to health throughout the world. www.essentialmedicine.org.

About the American Medical Student Association

The American Medical Student Association (AMSA), with more than a half-century history of medical student activism, is the oldest and largest independent association of physicians-in-training in the United States. Founded in 1950, AMSA is a student-governed, non-profit organization committed to representing the concerns of physicians-in-training. With more than 62,000 members, including medical and premedical students, residents and practicing physicians, AMSA is committed to improving medical training as well as advancing the profession of medicine. To learn more about AMSA, our strategic priorities, or joining the organization, please visit us online at http://www.amsa.org/.

MEDIA ADVISORY

Contact: Jake Izenberg
jacob dot izenberg at yale dot edu

Hundreds of Students, Scholars, and Experts to Gather at Yale Access to Medicine Conference

UAEM National Conference to Be Held November 14, 15

New Haven, CT – As part of their international campaign to enhance access to medicine, hundreds of students from the United States, Canada, Brazil, Germany, UK, and Tanzania will come to the Yale School of Medicine on November 14 and 15 for the 2009 conference of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines.

The conference comes on the heels of a substantial victory in the campaign to enhance access to medicines through changes to changes to university licensing and patenting policies. On Monday, November 9, Yale, Harvard, the Association of University Technology Managers, a several other universities announced that they had adopted a new set of principles to govern their licensing and patenting policies. UAEM called the announcement an important step forward, although far more progress is necessary in order to alleviate the current crisis in access to medicines that kills over ten million people per year.

At workshops, lectures, and activism trainings, the students from two-dozen universities will interact with scholars and practitioners in the fields of intellectual property, medicine, technology transfer, and public policy. They will exchange ideas, engage in policy and advocacy training, and develop strategies for their international campaign to promote access to medicines for people in developing countries. UAEM’s efforts in this regard are focused on changing norms and practices around university patenting and licensing and ensuring that university medical research meets the needs of the majority of the world’s population.

Highlight speakers at the conference will include Peter Hotez of George Washington University, long-time AIDS activists Eric Sawyer and Gregg Gonsalves, and Gorik Ooms, the former director of MSF Belgium and now faculty at Yale.

UAEM students are from major research universities where they are currently working to get their universities to adopt licensing policies that reflect academia’s responsibility to social justice, international development, and global health by ensuring that medicine developed at university laboratories will be licensed to pharmaceutical companies with agreements that allow generic manufactures to produce those same medicines for cheap distribution in low- and middle-income countries.

UAEM at Yale has the support of a number of other student organizations, including the Yale chapter of the American Medical Student Association, Yale Law Democrats, Yale Law Women Board ’09/’10, Women’s Health Interest Group, and the Yale Medical School chapter of the American Medical Association, among others

After years of UAEM campaigning, 6 universities, AUTM and NIH have agreed to access principles for licensing and patenting. While we are enthusiastic about the adoption of these principles and while the authors deserve praise for taking this important step, the document has important shortcomings, noted below. UAEM sees this document as a floor for future policies rather than a ceiling and we hope that other universities will go further still. We look forward to working with signatories to the document to ensure effective implementation and improvements in the months and years to come.

Congratulations to the amazing activism over the years that made this win possible.

Read the UAEM press release below.

Read news coverage of the policy on:
Bloomberg News
IP-Watch
Chronicle of Higher Education
Yale Daily News
Pharmalot
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/87/i46/8746notw5.html

Contact: Ady Barkan
Email: adybarkan [at] gmail dot com

UAEM Welcomes University Action to Improve Access to Medicines, Draws Attention to Important Shortcomings in University-Adopted Principles

Yesterday Boston University, Brown, Harvard, the Oregon Health and Science University, the University of Pennsylvania, Yale and AUTM released a public document entitled “Statement of Principles and Strategies for the Equitable Dissemination of Medical Technologies” (available here: http://www.autm.net/endorse).

In response, the student organization Universities Allied for Essential Medicine (UAEM) released the following statement:

UAEM welcomes the Statement of Principles and Strategies published yesterday. UAEM has worked intensively with universities on access licensing since 2001, and we commend each of the six universities and the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) for their commitment to the principles laid out in this document.

The Statement of Principles includes a number of important developments, including commitments to not patenting in developing countries, to investing in research and development on diseases that impact poor countries, to developing public metrics that measure the global health impact of university policies, and to revisiting and revising the principles document biennially. Read more »

Our website was hacked recently and inappropriate content appeared. We would like to apologize for any inconvenience this caused our supporters. Thanks to our technical web support, we believe the problem has been resolved. We are working to try and avoid this happening again.

Thank you for your understanding

The UAEM team