ESF-IfW Conferences

The third of the new series of conferences will be on “The Global Organization of Biomedical Innovation: Funding, Intellectual Property Rights, Incentives, and the Diffusion of New Technology” and is scheduled to take place on October 3—8, 2007. It aims to bring together the world’s leading scholars from the most dynamic and most promising fields of biomedicine as well as health economists and other social scientists who can help with new insights from their own research to identify efficient research and investment strategies for specific fields and contribute to the design of knowledge management systems in biomedical innovation. It will be chaired by Frederic M. Scherer and M.N. Graham Dukes.

Frederic M. Scherer is Professor of Public Policy and Corporate Management in the Aetna Chair at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Emeritus. In 1974-76, he was chief economist at the Federal Trade Commission. His research specialties include industrial economics and the economics of technological change – with a number of recent publications on the problem of access to drugs in developing countries.

M.N. Graham Dukes is Professor of Drug Policy Studies at the University of Oslo, Norway, and Emeritus Professor of Drug Policy at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. From 1958 to 1972 he was engaged in research in the pharmaceutical industry, latterly as research manager of a multinational company. From 1972 to 1982 he was Medical Director of the Netherlands Commission for the Evaluation of Medicines, and from 1982 to 1993 head of the Pharmaceutical Programme of the World Health Organization (Europe) at Copenhagen, Denmark. As a consultant of the World Bank, he has assisted numerous countries in the development of new polices, the reorganisation of regulatory systems and in the design of pharmaceutical legislation and supply structures.

In line with the general objectives of the new conference series, the agenda of the third meeting on October 3—8, 2007 will be sharply focused, yet give room to a large number of speakers and particularly talented junior researchers and scholars. Biomedical innovation is likely to be the most important source of future gains in quality of life and longevity worldwide and to represent the socially most valuable major investment opportunity at the beginning of the 21st century. The process of globalization has enhanced that opportunity by extending the degree at which economies of scale in the generation and diffusion of new medical knowledge and technology can be exploited. To do so more efficiently will require the reorganization of a wide variety of activities, institutions and regulations that determine how well the private incentives are aligned with global priorities in maximizing human welfare. Particular emphasis will have to be placed on novel knowledge management systems that allow the social benefits and risks of new therapies to be predicted with greater accuracy and earlier in the development process of biomedical technologies. It is for these reasons that cooperation across the disciplines promises to be particularly fruitful in the coming years.