From Innovation to Access: Rethinking Intellectual Property for Public Health in South-East Asia

WHO’s 2025 South-East Asia report argues that equitable access to medicines depends not just on innovation, but on how intellectual property and technology transfer are deliberately managed across research, licensing, and manufacturing systems. It calls for public-health-oriented IP practices, non-exclusive and ethical licensing, and stronger regional capacity to turn publicly funded science into affordable health technologies.

The World Health Organization’s 2025 report on technology transfer and intellectual property in South-East Asia was shaped by growing unease among governments, research institutions, and public health agencies over how life-saving innovations too often fail to reach patients. Drawing on regional consultations and workshops held in Bangkok in 2023 and at the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology in Thiruvananthapuram in 2024, the report reflects engagement with universities, public research institutes, technology transfer offices, regulators, and manufacturers across the region. Its core concern is how publicly funded research, generated in academic and national institutions, can be translated into affordable medicines, vaccines, diagnostics, and devices through smarter intellectual property management and purposeful technology transfer.

Global Rules, Public Health Realities

The report is anchored in World Health Assembly resolutions on public health, innovation, and intellectual property, which frame access to health technologies as a prerequisite for universal health coverage and the Sustainable Development Goals. WHO situates this agenda within the interaction of public health policy, trade, and intellectual property law, drawing on the WHO-WIPO-WTO trilateral framework. While the TRIPS Agreement standardized global patent protection, the document stresses that it also preserved policy space through flexibilities reaffirmed by the Doha Declaration. Compulsory licensing, government use provisions, parallel imports, and transition periods for least developed countries are presented not as loopholes, but as essential legal tools for protecting public health, tools whose importance was made starkly visible during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Managing Innovation Without Locking It Away

A central theme of the report is the growing responsibility of universities and public research organizations in shaping access outcomes. Technology transfer offices are described as key intermediaries that manage patents, negotiate licenses, and forge partnerships between academia and industry. Effective IP management, WHO argues, goes far beyond patent filing. It includes freedom-to-operate analyses, strategic decisions about where and how to protect inventions, and licensing choices that balance commercial incentives with social objectives. The report emphasizes that poorly designed licensing arrangements, particularly exclusive ones tied to publicly funded research, can delay generic competition and restrict access, especially in low- and middle-income countries.

Licensing Choices That Shape Access

The report devotes significant attention to intellectual property commercialization in health care, distinguishing between assignment and licensing, and between exclusive and non-exclusive licenses. Exclusive licensing is acknowledged as sometimes necessary in capital-intensive areas such as biopharmaceuticals and vaccines, where companies must invest heavily in development and clinical trials. However, WHO cautions that exclusivity can also entrench monopolies and inflate prices. Non-exclusive licensing, by contrast, is presented as a powerful mechanism for expanding supply, fostering competition, and reducing costs. Ethical and socially responsible licensing practices, such as tiered pricing, global access clauses, and royalty waivers for least developed countries, are promoted as best practice for publicly funded institutions seeking to ensure that innovation serves public health rather than narrow commercial interests.

Building Regional Capacity for Equitable Access

The report places South-East Asia within a rapidly evolving global health innovation landscape. India’s leadership in generics, biosimilars, and emerging platforms such as mRNA and gene therapies, Thailand’s advances in vaccines and universal health coverage, and Bangladesh’s strength in export-oriented pharmaceutical manufacturing are portrayed as complementary regional assets. WHO-led initiatives such as the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool and the mRNA technology transfer programme are highlighted as practical efforts to institutionalize non-exclusive licensing and shared know-how, strengthening local manufacturing capacity and pandemic preparedness. The report concludes that equitable access is not an automatic outcome of innovation, but the result of deliberate choices embedded in IP governance, licensing practices, and regional cooperation. If South-East Asian countries invest in IP awareness, regulatory harmonization, financing mechanisms, and public-private partnerships, WHO argues, they can build a resilient health ecosystem in which innovation reliably translates into lives saved.