As with every year so far this decade 2025 has been both surprising and challenging, in the health sector as much as anywhere else. The general reduction in Official Development Assistance funding and the focus on simplifying the global health architecture have contributed to a changed and changing landscape.

We all have to adapt and for MPP our relatively small size allows us the agility to do that rapidly. Amongst other things this means working ever more closely and synergistically with partners, especially key ones like Unitaid and the World Health Organization (WHO), the latter itself going through a period of huge change. In this environment we have been developing a new five-year strategy, which will be launched in 2026. As part of that we have been looking at our image – and also our name. We’re now 15 years old and we no longer just do medicines, as we are heavily involved with vaccines through the mRNA Programme, and more recently diagnostics through WHO’s Health Technology Access Programme. Equally we are no longer just about licensing patents, because technology transfer has become a key part of our work. And patent pooling has not, in practice, been a big part of our work. We are not, however, planning to change our name – but rather to concentrate on our initials as part of our new look next year and, anyway, almost everyone already refers to us simply as MPP.

New Licence for Long-acting HIV Treatment

One of the effects of this volatile environment is that access to health products has been overshadowed by pricing concerns. Nonetheless, we were delighted to announce a licence from ViiV Healthcare for long-acting cabotegravir for HIV treatment. In addition, ViiV agreed to extend the licence for cabotegravir used for HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis to the private markets in 10 countries with royalties. We are also very happy that quality-assured generic nilotinib developed under our licence from Novartis is now reaching patients with chronic myeloid leukaemia in El Salvador, Indonesia and the Philippines for the first time.

There is an unfortunate misconception that licensing to MPP takes too long. This is simply not true. We negotiated the licence for Paxlovid from Pfizer in just 10 weeks – and less than two months to select appropriate licensees, after receiving 167 applications, but this seems to have been forgotten. We can be very quick, but we also need our stakeholders to be equally committed to speed.

Offering Practical Solutions to Challenges set by Pandemic Accord

We therefore have high hopes for greater access in 2026, not least because MPP is uniquely positioned to deliver some of the benefits being discussed at WHO in the context of the Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing article of the Pandemic Accord, including voluntary licensing, technology transfer and South-South R&D. We truly are a practical solution to some of the difficult discussions now taking place.

Access to appropriate medicines for children remains a key focus for us and sales of the paediatric HIV fixed-dose combination of abacavir, lamivudine and dolutegravir have now surpassed sales of stand-alone paediatric dolutegravir, signalling that this transition to an improved regimen is gaining momentum. We remain committed to our role as vice chair of the WHO GAP-f (Global Accelerator for Paediatric Formulations Network) strategy committee and have played an active role in five paediatric drug optimisation exercises – for sickle cell disease, epilepsy, RSV, dengue and malaria.

Official Launch of Phase 2.0 of mRNA Technology Transfer Programme

Following the success of phase 1, together with WHO we have officially launched mRNA Technology Transfer Programme 2.0, the second phase of this ground-breaking project, intended to ensure its sustainability by supporting the participating companies to produce mRNA products on an ongoing basis so that they will always be ready whenever the next pandemic arrives. These products will come either from R&D consortia already established amongst the participating companies or through in-licensing mRNA products developed elsewhere. This means that by 2030 the Programme will also be self-sustaining and will no longer need the financial and technical resources that our generous funders have been committing to it. In addition to this work in mRNA we are also part of a consortium led by US Pharmacopeia that is receiving a four-year grant from Unitaid for a project called the Medicines Supply Resilience (MedSuRe) Africa program to strengthen regional manufacturing of medicines for HIV, malaria and maternal health in Africa.

MPP’s Presence at High-level Meetings and Events

Throughout the year we attended, spoke at, had stands at or organised, events across the world from the African regional Manufacturing Conference in Ghana to the World Cancer Leaders’ Summit in Australia, to the UN high-level meeting on NCDs in New York to the meeting on Building Resilience through Local and Regional Approaches to Pandemic Preparedness at the French Permanent Mission in Geneva during the World Health Assembly. We are working to reduce our carbon footprint by reducing travel wherever possible but our work is primarily based on trust whether from governments, the pharmaceutical industry or civil society and it’s next to impossible to build that from behind a screen.

That trust is not only built by spending in-person time with stakeholders; it is also about clear and consistent communication of our identity, what we do, our unique value proposition and the impact we have. Our website is therefore constantly updated with the latest on all those things and in particular with stories about the people who are benefitting from our licences. Please do visit it if you haven’t done so recently – www.medicinespatentpool.org. We also launched this year a campaign on LinkedIn called Licensing Saves Lives (https://lnkd.in/eDizXjQb). You can find more details either there or on our website.

New Expertise on our Governance Board

We were delighted to welcome two new members to our Governance Board – Ntobeko Ntusi, the President and CEO of the South African Medical Research Council and Mathieu Saint-Arnaud, manager director at Deutsche Bank, Geneva. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the whole Governance Board for their unwavering support and guidance and equally the staff at MPP who have remained upbeat, motivated and focused throughout this difficult year. As ever, we are hugely grateful for our current donors – Unitaid, our founder and Belgium, Canada, France, Germany and Switzerland – and we are excited to be on the point of getting our first grant from a philanthropic organisation. We hope you will continue to support us. We are a very small team but we do punch above our weight. In fact we are just having our ‘return on investment’ calculated with a methodology used by other global health organisations. It’s looking as if it will be impressive.

On a personal note, I am retiring at the end of next year and have handed in my resignation to the  Governance Board, who will begin looking for my replacement in January, meaning that, all being well, there will be a new ED in place by the end of 2026 and this will be my last end-of-year message. It has been an absolute privilege working at MPP and achieving everything we have together.