 Yw bod Dan. Mae'n gronau allan o'r f impactful ar y ddiffenio. Roedd defnyddio'r ddiffenio a fyddwn i ddadunoand ar gyfer mawr mwybeithio. Mae'r ffilm yn gofio yma. Dwi'n meddwl yn gallu Lledele ac mae'r ffysig yma yn gwirio am ffordd eich cyfnod o'r proiectau yn ffordd mewn gondol ac yn gwirio amser cyfnod. Rwy'n gyddiw'r cyfarfyn ar hynent i gyffredinol i gyddon ymgyrch yn Cymbrage dyma i gyd-dwynych ac yn ydych chi'n ddiwydiad fras profiadau a wedi'i gweld o'ch cyfrannu cyfrannuol, i gyfyddiad o'r cyfrannu'n gyfrannu a'r cyfrannu i gyd-dwyno. Felly o答fyn rhaid i'w gyd-dwynaeth o'r rhagorogi am chi, cyflosedwyd ar y trofyn yma, yn amser fel ymddangos o'r ydyn ni'n llyfe o fawr o'r ersfyn! I would like to at this point without even going a moment further to give a brief shout out to two of the people aside from Lionel of course who have been very instrumental in bringing this day together. That's John Liddicoat, who is sitting over here. You will see him throughout the day. And also Matt Jordan who is up the back there. So I shall be describing how and why we've organised the day the way we have, but I'm really the spokesperson for other minds. All right, so first a little about our objectives and motivation. So each year for quite a few years now, CIPL holds a spring conference with the explicit aim of bringing together intellectual property practitioners with intellectual property academics. And the principal idea is to share information about statutory and case law developments in IP law. Plus add some recent academic research which practitioners might not ordinarily have the time to keep up with. And we hope that a foray into the academic world will showcase how we explore and perhaps have some role in helping to shape the field. So the topic of this year IP and health reflects a key research interest within CIPL and LML, the Center for Law, Medicine and Life Sciences. We are fortunate to be part of an international research collaboration that's been funded for five years by the Novo Nordisk Foundation. The focus of the collaboration is incentives for pharmaceutical innovation and whether various legally based incentives are working well or well enough. So amongst this are projects on five topics and a synergy cross cutting project, topics such as precision medicine, antimicrobial and repurpose drugs. And our collaborators include the University of Copenhagen, Harvard Medical School, Harvard Law School and the University of Michigan. So that has been a really marvellous collaboration and we're getting a lot out of it and we hope contributing quite a lot too. We're also very fortunate currently to have another international collaborator and that's Professor Rachelle Dreyfus from NYU in the US. And she's here with our law faculty for 12 months as the visiting good heart professor. That's a very esteemed position, the most esteemed visiting position in our law faculty. And it even comes complete with a traditional British characterful accommodation, which I'm sure Rachelle can tell you about. It's there, it's traditional. Right, so now I'd like to explain the topic in a little more detail. It's actually relatively simple. Intellectual property rights, I should apologize for some of you who are really expert in this field. This will be just very basic recap, but to set the scene and in view of the broad audience we have today. I just want to go over that intellectual property rights are exceptional rights in a competitive market. A variety of justifications have been offered and an equal number criticised. But in the main people accept some sort of cost benefit reasoning. The idea being that exceptional exclusivity is warranted because it works as an incentive for socially beneficial innovation, investment and dissemination, which would not otherwise happen or at least not to the same extent. Now when it comes to social benefit incentives to improve people's health is clearly a worthy goal. Health is really important without it. You don't have much and can't do much. You feel ill. You can't work, go to school. You struggle to utilise other social and civil rights. It's the foundation of so much and it warrants protection. And looking at current events as the world sits on the brink of a viral pandemic has taken hold in less than four months. Health can't be taken for granted in any country. And if intellectual property rights help incentivise activities that improve health, that's a good thing. And even strident critics of intellectual property rights such as James Besson and Michael Murer, take the view based on graphs like this that IPRs in the pharma industry have benefits that outweigh their costs. Even if they don't function in that way in other industries. However, we shouldn't be complacent. Like health, our IP system shouldn't be taken for granted. And like viruses, our IP system also evolves with time. It could take on many different forms. Legal historians, comparative legal scholars and practitioners working for multinational companies. You know this. You're highly aware of this. I'm coupled with the hope that policy influences, teachers and legal advocates might be able to steer the development of intellectual property law. It's worth checking its pulse, seeing if there's a case for a different diagnosis or a different patient management plan. And just like good medical practice, the IP system's health check needs to be holistic, multidisciplinary and evidence based. And this event is about that. Our overarching objective is to share information and views about whether IP is evolving in the right direction and a direction that is good for our health. OK, so now a word or two about the structure of the day. In the morning, we're going to have legal updates from leading practitioners. And each speaker's been asked to present for around 20 minutes, leaving 10 minutes for questions. And we'd like the audience to keep thoughts and comments in mind though as we'll have a longer discussion session at the end of the day. In the afternoon, we'll hear from three leading researchers and they will share their views on whether more detailed research lends credence to the view that IP law is good for our health. The researchers' talks have been organised to focus primarily on patent law and primarily on empirical data research. And this was because patent law and empirical data-driven research reflects strength within our faculty's IP research. I hope it doesn't sound too self-congratulatory, but we are becoming known as one of the strongest centres for empirical patent law research. And that now complements the accolades that the centres had for a long time for historical and international IP research led by Lionel and Henning. We had hoped that Ellen Tone would be part of the line-up in the afternoon, but unfortunately she's had a bereavement and so cannot be with us. I'm very sorry about this actually because I know she would have added a very important developing country perspective to our programme. Now then, just to wrap up over the remaining time, I'd like to forecast some of the questions that we hope to think about today. Because although the idea behind the conference is simple, answers to the questions raised by the topic are not. So the title of the conference is deliberately challenging, deliberately provocative. Is IP good for our health? What does the word good mean? Well, there's a question that has been troubling philosophers and people for centuries. How do we define good? Is it the greatest good for the greatest many? Or sufficient good for all? Or as political systems tend to approach it, good for some within our country's borders? Then having defined it, how might we go about measuring it or recognising it? There are two types of criticisms leveled at IP rights and their impact on health, particularly patent rights. The first criticism is that patents underpin excessive prices which overcompensate the pharma industry for its investment and risk taking, making it year on year one of the wealthiest industries. So a question this raises is whether there's a way to adjust IPRs so that the pharma industry is more averagely profitable. And medicines are less expensive and thus more accessible. Relatedly, can we achieve more granularity about the areas of pharma R&D and the firms which are generating excess profits and those that are struggling? Profitability is not uniform. A second criticism is that patents steer health research towards improvements that are valued by wealthy people. Not necessarily the improvements that would bring the most relief from suffering, for example improvements for the global poor. A question this raises is whether it is inevitable that patents work in this manner, given the connection between patent rights and market exclusivity. Is the problem actually capitalist markets? Another equally challenging issue is what do we mean with the words our health? Who is the hour? Is it people in the UK? Even that is a very heterogeneous group with multiple ages, ethnicities and a variety of socio-economic backgrounds. And what about the wider world? Are we talking about the health of people around the world? The health problems facing the global poor are huge and very different from the leading causes of mortality and morbidity in the western world. And what do we mean by health? Are we talking about health improvement from pharmaceutical pills? What about prevention, diagnosis and medical devices? One could even extend this to environmental health taking account of the idea that the health of environments, microorganism, animals and humans are all intertwined. We could also consider what we even mean by the concept of intellectual property. Clearly patents, trademarks and copyright. But what about trade secrets? What about intellectual property? And what about regulatory exclusivities, which don't actually often feature in intellectual property law textbooks? What about neighbouring issues such as fair competition? Another set of issues flow from the complexity of the IP system. IP could be likened to the human body, which although one unit comprises many systems, circulatory, nervous, musculoskeletal, respiratory and digestive systems. There are multiple IP rights, like human systems, and thus issues about overlap and interaction. And then within each right, such as patent law, there are questions about the architecture and policy levers, which we might adjust to better calibrate the system. For example, if we find a policy issue, should we adjust inventive step for all inventions if the effects are mainly felt in the farmer industry? Or should we try to tailor matters through subject matter eligibility or tailored defences? Now the relationship between IP rights and market transactions is also an important area to consider. Ultimately IP rights provide a bargaining position. They don't actually set prices or income. When we get a shock from high sticker prices for drugs, we might be tempted to lay the blame on the patent system, but it's also important to consider how prices are arrived at. Most countries have systems for price negotiations. Patent protection and regulatory exclusivities get people to the table, but high prices are partly the result of flaws in the subsequent negotiations. For example, limited disclosure about R&D expenditure, limited knowledge about prices agreed in other jurisdictions, and limited knowledge about the length of exclusivity that the patent owner might actually have before an alternative product comes to market. It's also important to remember that sticker prices are not necessarily the actual price being paid. Price cutting deals are done with major pharmaceutical buyers and individual hospitals. In some countries, like the UK, some pharmaceutical companies enter into arrangements whereby they actually pay back money if their profits exceed a certain pre-agreed level. Deciding which technique or approach we're going to use to address policy problems and calibrate the IP system is another big area of complexity. Another set of issues are born from legal certainty, or more precisely, a lack of legal certainty. It's quite difficult to track and evaluate recent developments if it's not entirely clear from where we are travelling and to what destination. A final question I'd like to pose is this. If we can't reach clear answers on whether IP is good for our health, is it worth asking the question at all? Is it as useful as Plato's proverbial blind man in a cave discussing what the world outside the cave looks like and how he might improve it? Or is the search for issues and possible responses and better data, a bit like health surveillance and systems-focused public health interventions, admittedly limited but plausibly beneficial? OK, so these are some of the questions for today. We may not get to all of them. Some will be discussed expressly and some will be implicit under currents, but I'd like to encourage you to think about them and to feel free to raise them in discussions throughout the day. Thank you and have a great day.