The Doha Round’s Public Health Legacy: Strategies for the Production and Diffusion of Patented Medicines Under the Amended TRIPS Provisions

This entry into force of the World Trade Organization (WTO) TRIPS Agreement in 1995 transformed the international intellectual property system. The harmonization of basic intellectual property standards has operated to protect investment in innovation, limiting risks from unjustified \u27free riding.\u27 Yet these same harmonized IP standards sharply curtailed the traditional capacity of suppliers of public goods, such as health care and nutrition, to address the priority needs of less affluent members of society, particularly in (but not limited to) developing countries. In the Doha Declaration, the Waiver Decision of 30 August 2003 and the Article 31bis Protocol of Amendment, stakeholders concerned with re-opening policy space for the supply of newer pharmaceutical products pushed back against the restrictive elements of the TRIPS Agreement. Governments around the world are in the process of deciding whether to ratify and accept the Article 31bis Amendment. Based on their Study for the International Trade Committee of the European Parliament, the authors argue that acceptance of the Amendment will provide a \u27net benefit\u27 for countries seeking to improve access to medicines. At the insistence of WTO delegations acting on behalf of the originator pharmaceutical industry lobby, Article 31bis regrettably is saddled with unnecessary administrative hurdles. Nonetheless, through skillful lawyering, political determination and coordinated planning, the system can be made to work. Among other options, expeditious back-to-back compulsory licensing linked with pooled procurement strategies may effectively achieve economies of scale in production and distribution of medicines. The authors doubt that the international political environment would support renegotiation of an \u27improved\u27 solution. They express concern that failure to bring the Amendment into force will open the door to a campaign to undermine the Waiver Decision. Recent events in Brazil and Thailand illustrate both the opportunities and risks associated with implementing TRIPS exception mechanisms, and help to inform views on the negotiating environment. Specific proposals for regional cooperation in implementing the Amendment are laid out, and the authors emphasize the importance of pursuing concrete transfer of technology measures in support of developing country pharmaceutical manufacturing. Over-reliance on private market mechanisms for the supply of public health goods leaves the international community with an unresolved collective action problem on a large scale

Microscopic dynamics of supercooled liquids from first principles

Glasses are solid materials whose constituent atoms are arranged in a disordered manner. The transition from a liquid to a glass remains one of the most poorly understood phenomena in condensed matter physics, and still no fully microscopic theory exists that can describe the dynamics of supercooled liquids in a quantitative manner over all relevant time scales. Here we present such a theoretical framework that yields near-quantitative accuracy for the time-dependent correlation functions of a supercooled system over a broad density range. Our approach requires only simple static structural information as input and is based entirely based on first principles. Owing to this first-principles nature, the framework offers a unique platform to study the relation between structure and dynamics in glass-forming matter, and paves the way towards a systematically correctable and ultimately fully quantitative theory of microscopic glassy dynamics

Equilibrium ultrastable glasses produced by random pinning

Ultrastable glasses have risen to prominence due to their potentially useful material properties and the tantalizing possibility of a general method of preparation via vapor deposition. Despite the importance of this novel class of amorphous materials, numerical studies have been scarce because achieving ultrastability in atomistic simulations is an enormous challenge. Here we bypass this difficulty and establish that randomly pinning the position of a small fraction of particles inside an equilibrated supercooled liquid generates ultrastable configurations at essentially no numerical cost, while avoiding undesired structural changes due to the preparation protocol. Building on the analogy with vapor-deposited ultrastable glasses, we study the melting kinetics of these configurations following a sudden temperature jump into the liquid phase. In homogeneous geometries, we find that enhanced kinetic stability is accompanied by large scale dynamic heterogeneity, while a competition between homogeneous and heterogeneous melting is observed when a liquid boundary invades the glass at constant velocity. Our work demonstrates the feasibility of large-scale, atomistically resolved, and experimentally relevant simulations of the kinetics of ultrastable glasses.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

Theoretical investigation of electron-hole complexes in anisotropic two-dimensional materials

Trions and biexcitons in anisotropic two-dimensional materials are investigated within an effective mass theory. Explicit results are obtained for phosphorene and arsenene, materials that share features such as a direct quasi-particle gap and anisotropic conduction and valence bands. Trions are predicted to have remarkably high binding energies and an elongated electron-hole structure with a preference for alignment along the armchair direction, where the effective masses are lower. We find that biexciton binding energies are also notably large, especially for monolayer phosphorene, where they are found to be twice as large as those for typical monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides.Comment: 3 figures, 5 pages + Supplementary Material, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Relaxation Patterns in Supercooled Liquids from Generalized Mode-Coupling Theory

The mode-coupling theory of the glass transition treats the dynamics of supercooled liquids in terms of two-point density correlation functions. Here we consider a generalized, hierarchical formulation of schematic mode-coupling equations in which the full basis of multipoint density correlations is taken into account. By varying the parameters that control the effective contributions of higher-order correlations, we show that infinite hierarchies can give rise to both sharp and avoided glass transitions. Moreover, small changes in the form of the coefficients result in different scaling behaviors of the structural relaxation time, providing a means to tune the fragility in glass-forming materials. This demonstrates that the infinite-order construct of generalized mode-coupling theory constitutes a powerful and unifying framework for kinetic theories of the glass transition

Conductivity of disordered quantum lattice models at infinite temperature: Many-body localization

We reinvestigate the behavior of the conductivity of several disordered quantum lattice models at infinite temperature using exact diagonalization. Contrary to the conclusion drawn in a recent investigation of similar quantities in identical systems, we find evidence of a localized regime for strong random fields. We estimate the location of the critical field for the many-body localization transition for the random-field XXZ spin chain, and compare our findings with recent investigations in related systems.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Correlation of Local Order with Particle Mobility in Supercooled Liquids is Highly System Dependent

We investigate the connection between local structure and dynamical heterogeneity in supercooled liquids. Through the study of four different models we show that the correlation between a particle's mobility and the degree of local order in nearby regions is highly system dependent. Our results suggest that the correlation between local structure and dynamics is weak or absent in systems that conform well to the mean-field picture of glassy dynamics and strong in those that deviate from this paradigm. Finally, we investigate the role of order-agnostic point-to-set correlations and reveal that they provide similar information content to local structure measures, at least in the system where local order is most pronounced.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures and 6 page sup. with 5 figures and 1 tabl