Students unite for open innovation and global access to tuberculosis drug sutezolid | The Lancet Global Health Blog

"On Jan 25, 2017, after more than 2 years of advocacy by a student-driven coalition of global health advocates under the umbrella of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM), Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) announced an agreement that sutezolid, a promising tuberculosis drug, would be licensed to the MPP, with potentially groundbreaking implications for global health.

However, this important agreement nearly did not come to fruition. JHU was on the verge of exclusively licensing its intellectual property around sutezolid to Sequella, a pharmaceutical company which already held some licensing rights. Sutezolid is an oxazolidinone antibiotic that has shown both superior efficacy and less toxicity for patients than the current commercially available drug, linezolid. It had shown promising results in phase 2a clinical trials, but since 2013, when Sequella acquired its license from Pfizer, no new studies of sutezolid have been successfully conducted."