A high-level meeting on Intellectual property regime against the backdrop of the latest global trends in the pharma sector will be held here today to shape out the direction for India and boost Indian prospects especially in the area of tropical diseases.

Senior officials including health secretary Naresh Dayal, experts and industry representatives will attend the meeting to assess the implications of IPR, innovative solutions, limitations and scope for adopting pooling of solutions for drug discovery.

The experts will discuss the broad trends in IPR particularly in the patents which adversely affect management of health deliverables, what mechanisms can be designed to make research and development of drugs for Type-II/III diseases attractive to them, and open source drug discovery model suitable for south- south collaboration. The current dynamics of innovation in health sector adequate to induce investment in pharmaceutical R&D and deliver the needed results, need to formulate new proposals in both 'pull' and 'push' categories that are more relevant to India, use the alternative proposals and benefit from them in light of WHO's Action Plan and increased funding from other agencies will also come for discussion

Most of the developing countries across the globe are grappling with the issues related to innovation, incentives and access, when it comes to cost effective solutions for tropical diseases. In case of some diseases like HIV/AIDS, cancer, cardio-vascular diseases while access is a major problem in developing countries, the need for further innovations in medicines, diagnosis and treatment is well accepted.

The report from Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation and Public Health (CIPIH) in 2004 led to the constitution of Working Group on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property (IGWG) at the World Health Assembly in 2006.

These discussions are taking place in context of wider international development in the area of Human Genome Project, which has catalysed open source movement in genomics research. Lack of innovation is the most important issue in treating neglected diseases and Type-II/III diseases. For developing nations like India, the distinction between Type-I, and Type-II and Type-III diseases is not relevant on account increase in obesity, number of persons affected by diseases like diabetes, cardio-vascular diseases and cancer. Thus the challenge before them is to ensure that while innovation takes place accessibility issues are also addressed and solutions are found to tackle both, according to the experts.

Dr Biswajit Dhar, director general, Research and Information System (RIS), New Delhi, Professor Arvind Virmani, chief economic advisor, Ministry of Finance, Vineet Chowdhry, joint secretary, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, and Dr K Satyanarayana, deputy director general, Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), will also attend the discussion.