Parallel Trade in Pharmaceuticals: Re-Aligning National Patent Exhaustion and Life-Saving Drugs

Abstract

The author, through this paper, shall seek to determine whether parallel trade, especially in the context of life-saving drugs, increases potential healthcare access1 to the developing and developed nations or in crisis markets, without significantly jeopardizing either the general safety of the goods, or diluting the sanctity of the intellectual property purpose.2 In the first segment of the paper, the author shall seek to demonstrate the business law link between the economics of parallel trade with the international context of patent exhaustion, following which the author will then go on to examine global policy regimes which have dealt with this issue in specific consumer market situations. Special focus shall be drawn to the markets of Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States of America and Canada in order to narrow down on policy experiences. In the final and concluding segment of this paper, the author shall attempt to re-align the existing competing interests on the question of exhaustion, with the objective of reaching a suitable policy position on this. As part of this segment, a detailed study of existing litigation and case law shall also be studied in order to suggest suitable solutions to determining the parallel trade question.