Innovation And Competitive Capacity In Bangladesh's Pharmaceutical Sector

The global pharmaceutical sector is highly patent intensive, and firms rely on product, process and formulation patents to protect their innovations. Intellectual property rights on pharmaceutical products, as contained in the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (hereafter, the TRIPS Agreement) have been defended on grounds of extensive R&D investments required to discover and develop new drugs. But at the same time, grant of uniform pharmaceutical patents in all developing and least developed countries that are members of the World Trade Organization in accordance with the TRIPS Agreement, raises a range of issues for access to medicines.