Global Health and Justice in International Biomedical Research: A Moral Defence of the Contribution Model of Intellectual Property Rights

The unequal distributions of benefits and burdens in international biomedical research raises concerns about injustices in global health. This thesis argues that sharing resulting intellectual property rights with the host nations whose participants make important contributions to such research provides a promising way to address key injustices in this context. Such an approach, offers a morally superior way of bringing greater fairness in international biomedical research, and of increasing access to medicine in developing countries, than do existing approaches. Also, achieving global health rights requires improving developing nations’ capabilities to negotiate fairer benefit sharing agreements with the developed nations’ research sponsors.