IP rights offer innovators the exclusive right to exploit their innovations while recovering their expenditures, by providing IP owners with the ability to stop others from commercializing infringing products. During a public health crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic, where time is of the essence, these competing interests rose to the forefront, as the patent community grappled with the question: how do we effectively balance respecting an owner’s IP rights with promoting the research and commercialization of life-saving vaccines in an expedited way? In the rush to develop COVID-19 vaccines, the patent community balanced these competing interests via patent pledges. However, in the face of other public health challenges even well before the COVID-19 pandemic, several alternative approaches were also proposed by others, including the pooling of Standard Essential Patents (SEPs).
Companies have been exploring the potential to use combinations of various checkpoint inhibitors to enhance the treatment of patients with various cancers. The recent approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration of Bristol Myers Squibb’s Opdualag™ for the treatment of patients with unresectable or metastatic melanoma shows that such combinations offer new avenues for patients suffering from cancer. Opdualag™, a fixed-dose combination of the antibodies nivolumab (a programmed death-1 inhibitor) and relatlimab (a lymphocyte activation gene-3 inhibitor) formulated as a single intravenous injection, showed improved results compared to nivolumab monotherapy.