Law & Technology: Polycentric Healthcare Innovation (co-authored with Wendy Epstein)

Session 3: Polycentric Healthcare Innovation (co-authored with Wendy Epstein)
Laura Pedraza-Farina (UCLA)

Room 134
Thursday, February 22, 2025
10:00 – 11:50 a.m. (PT)
Organized by Proj. Tejas Narechania & Prof. Colleen Chien

Abstract
Polycentric Drug Innovation
Wendy Netter Epstein & Laura G. Pedraza-Fariña

Our drug innovation ecosystem—the set of rules, actors, and institutions that influence the pace and direction of technological innovation in healthcare—is both complex and fragmented. Legal scholarship has begun to explore how incentives beyond patent rights influence the direction of innovation. But this scholarship is still largely focused on how policy levers–grants, patents, regulatory exclusivities and insurance reimbursement schemes–operate within specific institutions. In this Article, we argue that developing coherent drug innovation policies is all but impossible without first understanding the interplay between policy levers and multiple institutional contexts. We set out to fill this gap in the literature by both synthesizing how institutional complexity and fragmentation impact drug development and by drawing on polycentric governance principles emerging from literature on commons management to develop a proposal that manages institutional fragmentation and optimizes drug innovation.

In the context of technology, how can the law promote abundance, efficiency, and access while also advancing values like fairness, safety, and privacy? What institutional arrangements and governance structures best support the consistent and equitable application of the law? And what empirical and legal theoretical insights can be leveraged to explain or improve the development and operation of technology law and policy? In this colloquium, we will explore these and related questions through the lens of seven projects, whose subject matter will draw from intellectual property, telecommunications, and related bodies of technology law.

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