Facilitating access to patent information

Understanding the patent status of individual health products is essential to the procurement process and the reliable access to medicines. WHO works with Member States and partners on a number of activities to assist in this process. WHO’s Global strategy and plan of action on public health, innovation and intellectual property guides work on facilitating access to databases containing information on health-related patents. It also promotes further development of similar global databases.

Other activities aim to further the goal of a complete, accessible and clear source for patent information. For example, WHO South East Asia Region and Western Pacific Region have published a guide on how to conduct patent searches for medicines to introduce non-experts to the science of patent searches to facilitate the procurement of the most cost-effective quality medicines. WHO and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) jointly developed a patent landscape report that provides an overview on what is being patented in terms of disease targets, who is doing the patenting, where patents are filed and on how patent policies change over time. WHO also assists national health authorities and international organizations to identify, on request, the patent status of specific health products in specific jurisdictions.