Is it Really About Innovations for Health? Patents over Life: the Moral Economy of Politics and Markets Governing Access and Benefit Sharing of Medicines in the Global Innovation Commons

Kathryn C. Ibata-Arens, PhD (DePaul University)

Since landmark Supreme Court cases in 1980 granting patents over living things for the first time in history (recombinant DNA and engineered bacterium), private firms have continued to patent such living organisms as plants and parts of animals and humans, selling the living world around us to us under monopoly patents supposedly improving human health. Further, since 2019, prices for life-saving treatments have risen to millions of dollars per “dose” widening the gap between who gets access to health and medicines and who does not. Introducing an analytical framework, a typology of innovation system architectures (TISA), the research project asks how far is too far in allowing patents over life itself – in the name of innovation and profit?