Led by Beth Boyer at Duke Margolis

Drugs and other medical innovations often have uses beyond their original intended purposes. However, firms have little financial incentive to research these novel, but socially valuable uses because firms cannot enforce patents on new uses for off-patent drugs. This may have played out during COVID: research suggests that, for COVID, pharmaceutical corporations were much less likely to sponsor research on repurposing drugs with generic competitors. Pull mechanisms are capable of addressing this problem because they can incentivize investment to achieve well-defined health outcomes. Funders can target these funding mechanisms to fight future pandemics (e.g., to produce antivirals) and, also, to address other health conditions, more broadly.

Read the policy memos: US Common Diseases and Neglected Tropical Diseases and watch the pitch