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Salzau Castle, Salzau, Germany
3-7 October 2007
Biomedical innovation is likely to be the most important source of future gains in quality of life and longevity worldwide and represents 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 scale 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 the 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.
The conference will assemble 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. In this way, the conference will provide a unique forum to develop and discuss new ideas about funding, about the design of intellectual property rights and other incentive mechanisms and about diffusion policies, both with regard to research findings in general and with regard to particular new technologies that are ready for practical application. Specific fields to be represented may include nanomedicine, systems biology, functional genomics, pharmacogenetics, cancer research, organ transplantation, infectiology, and immunology.
In each of these fields, the conference will consider technological opportunities and current innovation barriers in order to identify priorities for further research investments and policy action. To determine research priorities and the optimal amount of funding, the conference will discuss new developments in economic methods, such as cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis, as well as strategies to mobilize the required funds at the national and at the global level. The distribution of the financial burden across social groups within and between countries as well as the role of health insurance schemes, government taxes and other mechanisms in raising the funds will be considered.
A second set of issues for the conference arises from the role of intellectual property rights and other incentive mechanisms in the development of specific fields; patents, the strongest form of intellectual property rights, are known to have serious shortcomings and may not even be the second-best solution in some fields of biomedical innovation, nor should they be uncritically viewed as a panacea to the diffusion problem. The conference will discuss how new strategies to set incentives for innovation and diffusion, such as the academic model of “open source,” can play a greater role in biomedical research and development, especially in view of the need to improve the flow of knowledge between universities and private industry.
A third set of issues arises from the diffusion problem, broadly defined as spanning the whole value-chain from the inventor to the consumer of health care services that incorporate biomedical innovations. Diffusion in this broad sense is bound to be affected by a variety of critical policy choices, such as in the design of regulations for clinical trials, in the definition of information and efficacy requirements for biomedical product approvals, and in the pricing and reimbursement decisions of social health insurance and national health systems. Our conference will provide the forum to discuss how these choices and other organizational issues in biomedical innovation can and should be resolved within countries and at the international level – from a European and from a global perspective.
Sessions will focus on: Demand and Supply in the Global Market for Biomedical Innovation - The Role of Government Funding and Private Insurance - Intellectual Property Rights and International Trade - The Social Returns to Biomedical Research - The Fragile State of Europe’s Biomedical Industry - Health Care Institutions, Investment Incentives, and the Diffusion of Innovations.
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Organized by:
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European Science Foundation (ESF) |
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Invited Speakers:
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Yelzhan Birtanov, Institute for Healthcare Development, KZ - Carlos M. Correa, University of Buenos Aires, AR - Dietmar Harhoff, University of Munich, DE - Liselotte Højgaard, Rigshospitalet Copenhagen, DK - Darius Lakdawalla, RAND, Santa Monica, US - Ramanan Laxminarayan, Resources for the Future, Washington, US - Frank R. Lichtenberg, Columbia University, US - James Love, Consumer Project for Technology, Washington, US - Luigi Orsenigo, Bocconi University, Milan, IT & University of Sussex, UK - Mark V. Pauly, University of Pennsylvania, US - Frederic M. Scherer, Harvard University, US - Ellen F.M. 't Hoen, Médecins sans Frontieres, Paris, FR - Koen Wiedhaup, Netherlands Genomics Initiative, NL - Peter Zweifel, University of Zurich, CH
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Deadline for Abstracts:
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20 July 2007
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Registration:
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Closing Date for Applications 20 July 2007
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E-mail:
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jkelly@esf.org
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