President Mark Yudof

1111 Franklin St, 12^th Floor

Oakland, CA 94607

President Yudof,

I believe that global access should be a priority in patenting and licensing practice and that the University of California must adopt a system-wide policy to ensure global access to the fruits of our research.

The work done in our labs by our students and faculty yields important life-saving medicines and medical technologies. The patenting and licensing practices of our university should reflect our public mission and prioritize the global impact of our inventions. The world’s least fortunate should not suffer when it is in our power to cure.

As a fellow member of the University of California community, I ask you to implement a global access policy to make the products of our research available to all patients and to realize the University’s aspiration, expressed in the Stanford White Paper.

To this end, I ask you to implement a policy which will ensure that every relevant university technology is licensed as part of an effective and transparent strategy to make affordable versions available in quantity in developing countries. Such a policy would embody the following four principles:

1. Access is the primary goal of technology transfer activity,

2. Technology transfer should ensure access to the end-product needed by patients (e.g. formulated pill or vaccine),

3. Generic provision is the best and preferred way to ensure access in poor countries,

4. Generic provision requires affirmative provisions for dealing with follow-on patents and data exclusivity.