Abstract

     Although Americans enjoy access to a wide range of drugs to treat all types of diseases, ranging from life-threatening to lifesustaining, numerous serious illnesses exist for which either there are no drugs available or worse the drugs that do exist are not available in a particular marketplace, such as the developing world. This article focuses on how an open source licensing system premised on patent law can foster drug development to benefit the developing world. The first section discusses the access and research gaps and explains how patents, in part, contribute to these gaps. The second section briefly explains open source licensing practices in software before discussing why an open source approach attracts biomedical researchers and how it might differ from open source approaches in software. The third section evaluates existing open source biology projects that fall into two approaches. The fourth section compares open source approaches to other alternative patent-based approaches and concludes that an open source model provides the best incentives to reduce access and research gaps. The last section concludes that an open source approach is a viable alternative to current licensing strategies and suggests that open source licensing of patent pools provides the best incentive to promote downstream drug development.