On March 16th, 2023, Luis Villarroel, Director of NGO INNOVARTE met with Erika Dueñas, Head of the Intellectual Property Unit of the Division of Access to Medicines and Health Products of the World Health Organization (WHO) and current Coordinator of the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP), a WHO initiative.
The meeting sought to address the various ways in which the participation of technology transfer offices could be strengthened in C-TAP, an initiative that has technologies provided by Spain’s Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Superiores Científicas (CSIC) for a COVID-19 antibody serology technique and the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the development of several innovative therapies, early-stage vaccines and diagnostic tools for COVID-19.
This is part of the different actions carried out by the NGO to strengthen the C-TAP platform, such as the letter sent in January 2023 to the Director General of the WHO in which the proposals elaborated by Civil Society and recently published by the WEMOS Organization in its report “Making pooling work to end the pandemics: A qualitative analysis of the Covid-19 technology access pool”