The Medicines Patent Pool is improving access to essential medication where it’s most needed, but does it make economic sense?

A new UN-backed initiative is enabling qualified generic manufacturers to develop, produce and supply vital medicines such as antivirals independently. By reducing the cost of essential medicines, pooled licensing particularly benefits low- and middle-income countries, in sub-Saharan Africa, for instance. Maxim Studio/Shutterstock (no reuse), CC BY

The Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) is a not-for-profit organisation founded in 2010 with the support of the United Nations. Its mission is to improve access to essential medicines in low and middle-income countries (LMICs). It negotiates voluntary licences with patent holders – typically, pharmaceutical companies – before granting non-exclusive and geographically limited sublicences to manufacturers in targeted countries, where the originator companies, i.e; those that bring new medicinal products to the market are typically not active. This results in low or no royalty payments by sublicencees to patent holders, together with competition among multiple sublicencees in the targeted geographic markets, which helps reduce the price of medicines.

Over the 2020-2025 period, 44 products were in-licensed from 22 originator companies, and 62.14 billion doses of treatment were supplied through the MPP sublicences. For example, 286 million packs of 30 TLD tablets (the most widely used HIV regimen in the world) were supplied in 108 countries, including South Africa (93.7m), India (30.2m) and Nigeria (21.1m).