IIPI legal fellow Cameron Coffey participated in the American University Washington College of Law First Annual African Justice Initiative (AJI) Symposium on Interdisciplinary Legal Perspectives to Health in Sub-Saharan Africa on March 3, 2010. The symposium brought together speakers from various backgrounds to discuss how diverse aspects of the law can be used to combat health challenges in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Ms. Coffey spoke on the positive and negative effects patents have on access to medicines in Sub-Saharan Africa. She addressed current efforts to balance the role of the patent system in incentivizing the research and development of new drugs with the importance of making these drugs accessible to individuals in developing countries. Other speakers at the symposium included Mr. Steven T. Smith, Director, Office of Global Research, National Institutes of Health; Ms. Yasmin Halima, Director, Global Campaign for Microbicides; Corrine Parver, Practitioner-in-Residence and Executive Director, Health Law Project, LLM Program on Law and Government, American University Washington College of Law; and Professor Lindsay F. Wiley, O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, Georgetown University Law Center.