Hi,

Governance and regulation lag innovation. We see this across sectors. Authorities are always trying to play catch up, that is if they have some cool antitrust policing impulses. (Bless Vestager!)

In global health, this near-impossible race of laws trying to keep pace with the brave new reality is playing out in spectacular ways in the negotiations on the Pathogen Access Benefit Sharing negotiations at the WHO.

My colleague Vineeth has put together a comprehensive mapping of how data companies already benefit from monetizing pathogen information. Will health, trade and environmental experts negotiating the PABS instrument, classify data and AI companies as users of PABS information? Will they frame benefit sharing obligations for such actors? Can international law keep up?

It has been a really a revealing exercise to work on this. You can thank Vineeth.

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Best,

Priti

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I. ANALYSIS

How Data Companies Profit from Pathogen Information: The PABS Blind Spot

By Vineeth Penmetsa

Penmetsa is an India-based legal researcher with a strong interest in health law and global health policy. He can be reached at vineeth.penmetsa@gmail.com

Priti Patnaik contributed to this article

Countries share critical disease information under legally binding obligations, and modern digital-economy actors, right from Google’s AlphaFold to Amazon’s cloud infrastructure extract commercial value. There is an insufficient understanding of how commercially valuable pathogen data has already become to non-pharmaceutical actors in the context of the negotiations on the proposed Pathogen Access Benefit Sharing mechanism at the World Health Organization.

The fundamental problem: negotiators are writing rules for pharmaceutical companies circa 2007 while trying to regulate AI companies in 2025. This temporal mismatch traces back to Indonesia’s 2007 refusal to share H5N1 influenza samples after discovering that vaccines developed from Indonesian materials were being sold back to them at unaffordable prices - a precedent that has shaped current negotiations.