Drug Patents, Compulsory Licensing System Progress

As the important substance in prophylaxis and therapy, medicines play a vital part in controlling the public health crisis. Whether people would pull through the public health crisis almost depends on medicines they could obtain. Recent burst of epidemics such as SARS, H5N1 has aroused more attentions of international societies to public health crisis. How to ensure the accessibility of medicines becomes the key point in solving public health crisis.Pharmaceutical patent has promoted the R&D in pharmaceutical industry. However, the high price of patent medicines, which results from the exclusive protection of pharmaceutical patent, becomes the barrier in access to medicines. The conflict will be distinctive when it comes to public health crisis. How to balances pharmaceutical patent and public health in patent legal system drove me to write the thesis originally.Compulsory license is one of the main systems to limit patent rights. Although it is rarely performed in practice for it's severe impact on the exclusive right of patent holders, Compulsory license for pharmaceutical patent is typical in solving public health issues. More and more attentions to it have been paid in national and international laws and some breakthroughs have happened in practice.Most of recent researches on compulsory license of pharmaceutical patent focused on its significance in balancing private interest and public interest. Following the development of compulsory license system, this thesis tries to study how the compulsory license ensures the access to medicines by researches on types of compulsory license.There are two approaches to obtain medicines for a country. One is manufacture and the other is import. According to patent laws, Patent holders may use their using right and import right to prevent the manufacture or import of their patent medicines without admission.