Global health scholarship has failed to adequately consider the “BRIC” cluster of nations—Brazil, Russia, India and China—particularly in the aggregate. An article search with the keywords “BRIC” and “public health” yields just one publication. But these countries have a unique role to play in the global health enterprise by addressing global health problems as they build their own health syste...

The rule of law is increasingly understood as a foundational determinant of health; one which underlies other socioeconomic, political, and cultural factors associated with health outcomes.1 Strengthened rule of law and related human resource capacity are critical for achieving the health outcomes of the 2030 Agenda, Agenda 2063, the African Health Strategy, and other global and regional develo...

This paper seeks to set the practical discipline of public interest intellectual property (IP) management in public health into its broader policy context. The most immediate and direct impact of IP systems on public welfare results not from international standards nor from national legislation - though these norms are fundamentally important - but rather from the accumulated impact of numerous...

Generic medicines are a key strategy used by governments and third-party payers to contain medicines costs and improve the access to essential medicines. This strategy represents an important opportunity provided by the global intellectual property regimes to discover and develop copies of original products marketed by innovator companies once the patent protection term is over. While there is ...

Global health inequities persist despite significant increases in funding and a growing number of global health initiatives. Especially vulnerable to disease, the poor majority of the world's population currently cannot afford advanced medicines, and the diseases confined to the poor receive little attention from pharmaceutical research. As a complement to the existing intellectual property reg...

The World Trade Organization's Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) set global minimum standards for the protection of intellectual property, substantially increasing and expanding intellectual-property rights, and generated clear gains for the pharmaceutical industry and the developed world. The question of whether TRIPS generates gains for developing coun...

In 2008, the Global strategy and plan of action on public health, innovation and intellectual property (GSPA-PHI) was launched by the World Health Organization, to stimulate fresh thinking on innovation in, and access to, medicines and to build sustainable research on diseases disproportionately affecting low- and middle-income countries. As part of the activities of the GSPA-PHI, Sri Lanka has...

Publishing the first edition of the Southern Med Review (SMR) was a milestone and the SMR is going from strength to strength. We gratefully appreciate the support we have received from Pharmacy World and Science (PWS) who invited us to write an editorial about the SMR. Most of all though, thanks goes to you, the contributors, readers and the members of the SMR Advisory Board for providing a ste...

Pharmaceutical co-crystal formation represents a straightforward way to dramatically influence the solid-state properties of a drug substance, particularly its solubility and hence bioavailability. This short review summarises this highly topical field, covering why the topic is of interest in pharmaceutical formulation, the definitions and practical scope of co-crystals, co-crystal preparation...

Economist Michael Kremer recently proposed that the government offer to buy important pharmaceutical patents from their respective patent holdersJ His argument is that public ownership would largely eliminate the monopolist ic distortions caused by the patent system, distortions that tend to be especially acute in the pharmaceutical context, z Under Kremer ' s proposal, the government would pay...