News

UAEM names Ethan Guillén as Executive Director
Experienced organizer to drive university campaign for access to essential medicines

NEW HAVEN, CT.

On Friday, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce adopted a proposal for biosimilars that provides an excessive period of monopoly while allowing vast loopholes which could allow evergreening - ie under the proposal, companies could potentially restart the monopoly period for minor tweaks to the medicine.

Read an analysis of the evergreening problem by Essential Action here.

Read a joint statement from consumer and health advocates along with individual quotes below.

Statement of Consumer Groups Regarding Adoption of Industry-Backed Eshoo-Barton Amendment to Health Care Reform Legislation

We are deeply disappointed by the decision of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce to adopt the BIO and PhRMA-backed amendment on generic biologics. Instead of opening the door to less expensive generic drugs and the potential for enormous savings to patients and healthcare providers, including federal and state governments, this amendment will insure that BIO and PhRMA companies can charge monopoly prices for a minimum of 12 years. The proposal that passed today will also make it much easier for brand companies to wait until the eleventh hour to make minor changes to old biologics, and then renew the 12 year marketing monopoly an unlimited number of times.

Neither the brand industry nor the supporters of the amendment have ever credibly explained why the manufacturers of brand biologics should be entitled to a guaranteed 12 years of exclusivity, which is in effect 12 years of monopoly prices, when the patent system has been adequate to protect innovation in every other industry. They have also never explained why 12 years of exclusivity is appropriate for the manufacturers of biologics, when since 1984 the manufacturers of chemical drugs have thrived with five years of exclusivity.

UAEM's Annual Happy Hour Fundraiser in Washington, D.C.
Free Pool and Shuffleboard! Free food! Drink Specials!

Help us make this a success: please pass this invitaition on to your friends, family and colleagues in the DC area!

Please join us on Thursday July 30th for a happy hour to benefit Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, www.essentialmedicine.org, a national student-led non-profit working to bring life-saving medicines to patients in low-income countries.

A fun evening at one of DC's best neighborhood bars is planned! * Details below. * And the cause is a worthy one: 10 million people die each year from diseases that have available treatments. Tragically, throughout much of the world, patients simply cannot access the necessary medicines -- often because the drugs needed are unaffordable. (Indeed, during the fifteen seconds it takes to read this paragraph, five people have died from preventable causes.) Sadly and ironically, those unaffordable medicines are often the product of publicly funded research carried out at universities.

July 21, 2009

Senator John Cornyn
517 Hart Senate Office Bldg.
Washington, DC 20510

Senator Joseph Lieberman
706 Hart Senate Office Bldg.
Washington, DC 20510

Dear Senators,

The undersigned public interest organizations are writing to express their appreciation for your leadership in sponsoring the 2009 Federal Research Public Access Act (S.1373). This legislation would extend, improve and make more permanent an earlier open access initiative involving NIH funded research.

The new legislation would require that any federal agency with a budget or $100,000 or more for extramural research develop a policy on public access to publicly funded research. Among other things, the legislation would require government funded research papers to be made available in publicly accessible Internet archives within 6 months of publication in a peer reviewed journal, and would ensure the long-term preservation of, and free public access to, the published research finding in a stable digital repository.

Call Congress today to support Domestic and Global AIDS Funding. The calls are part of a coordinated effort of dozens of HIV/AIDS advocacy organizations calling on Congressional leaders to fulfill US commitments to global AIDS initiatives. From June 30-July 7, activists in cities across the country are targeting members of the US Senate Appropriations Committee, urging them to increase funding levels for global and domestic AIDS programs.

Call on Congressional leaders to fulfill US commitments to global AIDS initiatives.

Make your call today. Read how here and below.

This week UAEM was invited along with Doctors Without Borders/MSF and Oxfam to participate in Canadian government consultations on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). ACTA is has been highly controversial due to the secrecy with which it has been negotiated and the lack of clarity of the intentions of the negotiating parties. You can read more about the controversy here.

Today, UAEM along with Knowledge Ecology International and the Electronic Frontier Foundation made a submission to the Canadian government on the future of the ACTA negotiations which can be read below.

Thanks to the heroic efforts of Taylor Gilliland, Gloria Tavera and many others, UAEM has just released the first edition of our newsletter. Read it here.

The newsletter will be released on a quarterly basis and in advance of the next edition we'll be asking for submissions and new ideas. Thanks to the many people who contributed to putting it together.

UAEM is a part of a coalition of student groups that today launched a statement on the right to research by improving open access to research. You can read the statement and press release at http://www.righttoresearch.org/.

Student Statement on The Right to Research

Scholarly knowledge is part of the common wealth of humanity.

Unfortunately, not everyone has access to the scholarly literature, despite advances in communications technology. The high cost of academic journals restricts access to knowledge; in some fields, prices can reach $20,000 for a single journal subscription1 or $30 for an individual article.2 Despite these high prices, authors of scholarly articles are not paid for their work. The profits from these publications go solely to the publishers of the journals. A vast amount of research is funded from public sources – yet taxpayers are locked out by the cost of access.

Learning and inquiry are impeded when scholars lack access to fellow researchers’ work, and when students lack access to the work of scholars before them.

Hillary Chen, a member of our board who has headed up our alumni outreach efforts, has put together the first edition of our alumni newsletter. You can download it here.

In the future, alumni news will be included as a regular part of the UAEM newsletter.

While details are still to be worked out, from news coverage, it is clear that UAEMers at U of Edinburgh are making a difference.

Read below for excerpts from an article in The Observer.

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University forces firms to supply cheap medicines

Poor countries get drugs at cost price - or we won't licence our research to you, says Edinburgh University

* Paul Kelbie
* The Observer, Sunday 26 April 2009

Edinburgh is to become the first British university to help make cheap medicines available to the developing world by licensing research to pharmaceutical companies only on condition that poorer communities get life-saving drugs at cost price.

One in three people around the world has no access to basic medicines and 10 million children a year die for want of affordable and effective drugs. Now, under pressure from students, Edinburgh aims to force companies to supply cheap drugs in return for using patents held by the university. The idea has built on a World Health Organisation campaign supported by Bill Gates's Gates Foundation, Bill Clinton's Clinton HIV/Aids Initiative and the Department for International Development.