Paris

An international organization is to be set up later this year to help health researchers in the developing world to navigate the complex maze of intellectual-property law.

Patent and licensing agreements often have a bad name in developing countries. They are widely associated, for example, with the lack of affordable access to drug treatment for diseases such as AIDS.

The new body, called the Management of Intellectual Property in Health R&D (MIHR), aims to assist governments in the developing world to negotiate better deals for drug access, as well as helping researchers there to protect their own ideas. The New York-based Rockefeller Foundation will provide start-up funding of US$500,000 for the MIHR. With input from other donors, the MIHR's annual budget should reach US$3 million by 2006.

The organization will employ a small staff of patent lawyers to give training and free legal advice to governments and researchers in poor countries. It also plans to create free-access databases of patent information relevant to diseases such as malaria.

Ariel Pablos-Mendez, an associate director at the Rockefeller Foundation, says that the MIHR will try to persuade universities in rich nations to include provisions beneficial to poor countries in their licensing deals with drug companies.

John Kilama, president of the Global Biodiversity Institute, a Delaware-based organization providing information and training in biotechnology to developing countries, says that the MIHR can “fill a very important gap” by encouraging developing countries to make patent protection serve their own needs.

But Rosemary Wolson, an intellectual-property consultant at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, warns that it will not be easy for the new organization to win credibility, “bearing in mind how politically fraught the relevant issues are”.