Congratulations to Mélanie Bourassa Forcier, full professor at Université de Sherbrooke, CIRANO Researcher and Fellow for receiving SSHRC Insight funding for her project « Research Development and Equitable Access to Patented Medicines and Vaccines in the Context of a Pandemic ».

Yann Joly (Medicine, McGill University), Evelyne Jean-Bouchard (Law, Université Sherbrooke) and Anne-Marie Corriveau (Administration, Université Sherbrooke) are co-researchers of this project. Other collaborators will also be involved such as Vijay Kumar Chattu (University of Toronto), Caroline Ncube (Faculty of Law, Cape Town University), Daniel Kraus (Faculty of Law, University of Neuchâtel), Panos Kanavos (London School of Economics and Political Sciences), Antony Taubman (Lawyer, World Trade Organization) or Malo Depincé (Faculty of Law, University of Montpellier).

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the forefront the inequities that exist in access to patented medicines and vaccines around the world, while reaffirming the critical role of research and development (R&D) and access to data for the international health community. The practices observed over the past two years show the shortcomings of the normative framework underlying the patents in which the actors of the institutional and pharmaceutical communities operate.

The research project aims at identifying and proposing the elements (agreements, laws, policies, practices) of a normative framework related to patents that will maximize R&D and access to patented medicines and vaccines, particularly in the context of a pandemic. This project involves two main concepts, that is the notion of technological non-discrimination underlying patents as well as the notion of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) applicable to the pharmaceutical sector.

→ More information