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As a graduate student at the Rollins School of Public Health, Carolyn Kenline became involved with the international student group Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM), whose mission is to ensure that drugs invented at universities are made available in the developing world and to promote research into neglected diseases.
“We try to get them interested in things besides the profit margin,” says Kenline, who graduated in 2008. “This really works at Emory because of our strategic vision, which calls upon us to make a ‘positive transformation in the world.’ ”
As part of Emory Global Access Partnership (the local chapter of UAEM), Kenline and other students met with Office of Technology Transfer (OTT) Director Todd Sherer to see what could be done in terms of increasing global access to drugs and technologies developed at Emory.
With Sherer’s encouragement, the chapter decided to form a working group with administrators, faculty, and students from across campus. “President Jim Wagner was at the first meeting, and he charged us to come up with a University policy around global access,” Kenline says. “He definitely wanted it to be action, and not just a statement.”
Wagner says he is grateful to the students, in turn, for providing both the “energy and institutional conscience to ensure that these principles were developed and adopted. We are indebted to them for their clear moral thinking and for their persistence.”
Persistence proved to be a virtue for the group, which used “both carrots and sticks” in the final, streamlined version of the core principles, said Kenline. The President’s cabinet adopted the guiding principles, and OTT incorporated them into its licensing program.
The fact that students were drivers of the negotiations allowed all parts of the University to become involved, says Jennifer Moore, a molecular physiologist and licensing associate who was one of several OTT staffers to sit on the working group that hammered out the details.
“Overly restrictive humanitarian licensing policies can scare away potential licensees from the start,” says Moore. “Then no one benefits, people in the developing world included.”
But the students, she says, “were very motivated. They understood the market perspective, but they also recognized that to have an impact, the principles had to have some teeth.”
The questions the working group faced were pointed: For example, would Emory be willing to take a financial hit to ensure broader global access for their inventions?
“We came away with a commitment to openly discuss the issue with potential licensees and find ways to provide incentives for them to accept global-access friendly terms,” Moore says. “If the deal isn’t compelling enough to the company, we’re willing to explore ways to make it compelling.”
As far as the guiding principles, she says, the “neat thing is, we’ve already done a considerable amount of licensing that one would consider humanitarian friendly and that aligns nicely with the principles we’ve adopted. To formalize and publish these principles on our OTT website hopefully will raise awareness around the issue and get more universities and companies interested in pursuing similar initiatives.”
Wagner says that being explicit about the University’s principles “helps to clarify our intentions in our own minds” and provides guidelines for discussions with outside commercial interests who seek to license and produce products based upon inventions by Emory faculty. “We have a responsibility to try to remove the barriers—at least the barriers that lie within our power to control—that inhibit world access to technology and ideas that might improve the human condition anywhere,” he says.
Ultimately, Kenline agrees, it’s all about getting these medicines and health care tools “into the hands of the people who need them the most.”
The policy can be found here.
The working group members were:
- Todd Sherer (Assoc. VP and Director, OTT)
- Jennifer Moore (Licensing Associate, OTT)
- J. Cale Lennon (Asst. Director, OTT)
- Mary Severson (Assoc., Director, OTT)
- Dennis Liotta (Professor, Chemistry)
- Jeff Koplan (VP and Director Global Health Initiative)
- Steve Sencer (Deputy General Counsel, General Councel)
- David Wynes (VP Research Admin.)
- Deb McFarland (Assoc. Professor, Public Health)
- Chip Frame (Assoc Professor, Business)
- Liza Vertinsky (Asst. Professor, Law)
- Carlos Del Rio (Professor, Medicine)
- Carolyn Kenline (08 alum, MSPH in health policy)
- Stephanie Doan (08 alum, MPH in global health)
- Jackson Hughes (08 alum, JD, MBA)
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