Hundreds of Students, Scholars, and Experts to Gather at Yale Access to Medicine Conference
Project:
MEDIA ADVISORY
Contact: Jake Izenberg (jacob dot izenberg at yale dot edu)
Hundreds of Students, Scholars, and Experts to Gather at Yale Access to Medicine Conference
UAEM National Conference to Be Held November 14, 15
New Haven, CT – As part of their international campaign to enhance access to medicine, hundreds of students from the United States, Canada, Brazil, Germany, UK, and Tanzania will come to the Yale School of Medicine on November 14 and 15 for the 2009 conference of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines.
The conference comes on the heels of a substantial victory in the campaign to enhance access to medicines through changes to changes to university licensing and patenting policies. On Monday, November 9, Yale, Harvard, the Association of University Technology Managers, a several other universities announced that they had adopted a new set of principles to govern their licensing and patenting policies. UAEM called the announcement an important step forward, although far more progress is necessary in order to alleviate the current crisis in access to medicines that kills over ten million people per year.
At workshops, lectures, and activism trainings, the students from two-dozen universities will interact with scholars and practitioners in the fields of intellectual property, medicine, technology transfer, and public policy. They will exchange ideas, engage in policy and advocacy training, and develop strategies for their international campaign to promote access to medicines for people in developing countries. UAEM’s efforts in this regard are focused on changing norms and practices around university patenting and licensing and ensuring that university medical research meets the needs of the majority of the world’s population.
Highlight speakers at the conference will include Peter Hotez of George Washington University, long-time AIDS activists Eric Sawyer and Gregg Gonsalves, and Gorik Ooms, the former director of MSF Belgium and now faculty at Yale.
UAEM students are from major research universities where they are currently working to get their universities to adopt licensing policies that reflect academia’s responsibility to social justice, international development, and global health by ensuring that medicine developed at university laboratories will be licensed to pharmaceutical companies with agreements that allow generic manufactures to produce those same medicines for cheap distribution in low- and middle-income countries.
UAEM at Yale has the support of a number of other student organizations, including the Yale chapter of the American Medical Student Association, Yale Law Democrats, Yale Law Women Board ’09/’10, Women’s Health Interest Group, and the Yale Medical School chapter of the American Medical Association, among others.
