VACCINES - PATENTING DYNAMICS OF A POWERFUL HEALTH-CARE TOOL

Vaccines are considered to be some of the most powerful healthcare too ls of this century. From an industrial perspective, in the past they h ave not provided particularly attractive targets for investment, but t his situation changed dramatically in the late eighties and early nine ties with governmental initiatives aimed at stabilising the vaccine li ability situation together with advances in molecular biology and the emergence of biotechnology, opening-up new opportunities for solving t he scientific problems associated with vaccine developments. This pape r analyses how these developments are reflected in patenting activitie s worldwide. The comparison of vaccine patent applications with pharma ceutical patents as a whole indicates that vaccine research has been a very dynamic field during the last 15 years; total patent application s increased by a factor of 7.5 between 1980 and 1994. Genetic engineer ing approaches have established themselves as key tools for vaccine R& D, such techniques being applied in more than 50% of all vaccine paten t applications during the nineties. International vaccine patent appli cations are mainly driven by the US and Europe, which together contrib uted 91% of all patents and 96% of the genetic engineering related vac cine patents in 1994. Within Europe, France, Germany, Great Britain an d Italy are the most active countries. Key players in vaccine patentin g are American governmental agencies, international pharmaceutical cor porations, biotech firms, universities and non-university public resea rch organisations. All-in-all, public research activities seem to play a crucial role in the creation of scientific and technological knowle dge for the development of new vaccines.