Today’s innovative pharmaceuticals represent a modern-day miracle, the result of tremendous public and private investment in research, development, validation of safety and efficacy, and education of patients, healthcare providers, and payers. Innovative drugs have taken on an increasingly important - many would argue indispensable - role in healthcare. With the world’s increasing reliance on the fruits of pharmaceutical R&D, issues of access and cost have come to the forefront in the current healthcare policy debate. This conference will bring together speakers from across the U.S., Europe, and Asia to confront the multifaceted array of problems and opportunities in the international effort to maximize access to innovative drugs at a cost that appropriately reflects the difficult balance between retaining adequate incentives for further innovation while at the same time allowing access to patient populations with finite abilities to pay.

The conference will approach the problem from a variety of aspects, with speakers from academia addressing pertinent issues from the perspectives of law, science, business, and economics, as well as non-academic speakers from the public and private sectors and the judiciary. The international nature of the speaker lineup will facilitate an exchange of views that recognizes that the nature of the problem and the appropriate policy response varies across the globe, and provides a forum for a cross-fertilization of ideas across international borders intended to facilitate pragmatic solutions to a major challenge facing both current and future generations.