On 29th September 2023, Prof Aisling McMahon was invited to speak at an interdisciplinary workshop on “Public Health, Law and Markets” organised by Dr Mina Hosseini, University College Dublin, which was organised as part of Dr Hosseini’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship under the COMPHACRISIS project, supervised by Professor Imelda Maher, UCD. This workshop brought together a range of papers exploring multidisciplinary perspectives on public health and markets, and intellectual property law’s relationship with healthcare markets.
Professor Aisling McMahon’s paper was entitled ‘Patents, TRIPS and the Private Governance of Public Health: A Perpetuating Institutionalised Marginalisation of Health?’ This paper argued that there is an institutionalised marginalisation of health needs within the current global system around the operation of intellectual property rights. It makes the case that the current system – and how this system has developed – is not institutionally configured to prioritise health needs over IP rights even in times of crisis, and looks at the role of law in enabling and entrenching this marginalisation.
Professor McMahon is a Professor of Law, School of Law and Criminology, Maynooth University whose research specialises in health and intellectual property law. She is the Principal Investigator of the PatentsInHumans project.
You can find out more about the PatentsInHumans project by visiting the project website: www.patentsinhumans.eu or by watching this short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFVRHpzzuQM