Patent waivers alone may not lead to quick vaccine access, say experts

NEW DELHI: The waiving off of patents alone is unlikely to help improve vaccine availability anytime soon, scientists, legal experts and pharma industry executives said, pointing to the complicated technical knowhow, raw materials and infrastructure required to make vaccines while ensuring they are as safe and effective as the original developer intended it to be.

Several countries, including the US, France and the European Union are considering backing efforts countries such as India and South Africa for a global waiver of coronavirus vaccine patents to boost supplies.

While such a move could well be the first step in broadening access, patents alone do little to allow someone else to make biological therapeutics such as vaccines, unlike in the case of generic drugs, which are chemicals and can be replicated more easily with a recipe book of sorts.

“Patents are a way of protection of your intellectual and commercial information, speaking from a legal point of view. But just by reading a patent, does not necessarily offer the ability to replicate the product or the process, because while a patent does share a lot of the generic information, it protects the specifics, and it is not a self-guide,” said Prabuddha Kundu, co-founder and managing director at Premas Biotech, which is working on an oral Covid-19 vaccine.

To understand the challenge, consider the case of some coronavirus vaccines: AstraZeneca and J&J’s vaccines involve a bioengineered adenovirus that expresses the Sars-Cov-2’s spike protein; Novavax’s vaccine consists directly of the spike protein that has been cultured and grown in moth cells in labs.

“A chemical entity and a biological entity are very different. Even a simple protein, for example, is hundred times more complex or has more components than a drug like, say, paracetamol. There can be many ways to make paracetamol, and it would turn out to be exactly that but even if there were few ways to produce the protein, the final product varies in its final shape and form,” added Kundu.

For that, he added, “you must understand the process so well, that every time you carry it out, you end up with exactly the same product. In many situations in biologics, the process is the product”.

Legal experts in the pharma field said this constitutes knowhow, which often is a trade secret. “There is a clear divide between a patent and a trade secret. The technical know-how is proprietary. TRIPS provides for protection of undisclosed information, which would not be found in patents,” said Dev Robinson, partner and head, Intellectual

All countries will need to approve it, or majority will need to be on board for it to be a new declaration if not a full waiver

But patents alone will not enable more production. Vaccine developers will need to transfer know-how and tech, without which vaccines cannot be made

There will also need to be vast amount of investments in new or scaled-up facilities, which will take time

Property, at Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas.

TRIPS refers to Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights agreement under the World Trade Organization (WTO), the specific framework that India and South Africa have sought waivers under.

In an interview with HT published on March 26, Cipla chairman Yusuf Hamied too called vaccines “a different ballgame”, and said producing these was different from what the company did with an HIV drug in early 2000s, when it offered it to the world at a fraction of the cost.

“All drugs required for HIVAIDS were synthetic drugs, and in the synthesis of drugs, India, even at that time, was quite proficient. But vaccines are a different ballgame. You can pick up a patent of a vaccine manufacturer, and you still won’t be able

to produce,” he said.

Patents are in the spotlight as the world struggles to make access to vaccine equitable. The wealthiest 27 regions in the world account for 10.5% of the population, but 35.6% of vaccinations, Bloomberg reported.

Robinson added that securing a patent waiver in itself will be a long process and may do little to make the know-how available quickly. “How you can get private companies to part with trade secrets under changes to TRIPS agreement in the immediate future? I don’t know. The TRIPS agreement is still a treaty at the end of the day – what you have to do is get every member to agree, or at least by majority, to have it adopted.

He said a short term solution may “therefore lie in getting the cooperation of the private players to part with their know-how and to not assert their IPRs”.

Analysts said the production of coronavirus vaccines till now demonstrated the complicated challenges these processes involve, and they are particularly harder for breakthrough technologies like mRNA.

“There is a very big difference between vaccines and medicines. For vaccines, ingredients, formula etc are very important but equally important are the production and quality setup and the personnel needed to oversee that. We have actually seen where the number of staff required for quality checks is in a 10:1 ratio,” said Rasmus Bech Hansen, CEO of science analytics company Airfinity.

A second Airfinity analyst cited some cases. “AstraZeneca set up plenty of sites all around the world, some of which we haven’t seen open up yet – for example, sites in Australia and Europe have been behind schedule,” said Caroline Casey.

Kundu agreed with the assessments. “The analysts are right in saying that not only do you need duly trained manpower who should have done this before, but you need adequate equipment, tools and critical reagents to tell, if you are on the right path or not,” he added.

Kundu suggested that the steps to open up access may still be important. “That said, opening of IP can be beneficial on the long run to cater to a global crisis. The nuts and bolts have to be worked out,” he added.