I am proud to announce the AUTM Global Health Initiative. It is the result of a collaborative effort between universities and organizations who feel a responsibility to do their part, however modest, to help improve global health. I and others in our profession feel that we can help enable access to medical care in developing countries with a positive impact not only to people in those countries, but to the entire global community.
Through the active participation of AUTM members, AUTM has created the Global Health Toolkit, available on the AUTM Web site, to assist technology managersas they explore licensing possibilities. The Toolkit includes sample license clauses, AUTM position documents, relevant AUTM resources and related articles by experts in the field. I hope you find this Toolkit valuable and encourage feedback – what can we add to this collection to make it even more useful to you and your university? What works and doesn’t work?
As part of the AUTM Global Health Initiative, AUTM has endorsed the Statement of Principles on Global Access to Medicines. The principles were developed by a team that included AUTM leaders Jon Soderstrom, Ph.D., AUTM Immediate Past President and Managing Director of the Office of Cooperative Research at Yale University, and Ashley J. Stevens, D.Phil. (Oxon), AUTM President-Elect and Executive Director of Technology Transfer at Boston University. The Principles have been endorsed by Boston University, Brown University, Harvard University, Oregon Health & Science University, University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, and the National Institutes ofHealth.
The Principles declare our commitment to global access of new medical technologies and outline successful practices for the equitable dissemination of these technologies. I urge all AUTM members to present these Principles to their organizations, whether academia or industry, for review and endorsement.
To endorse the Principles visit the AUTM Web site at http://www.autm.net/endorse.