Achal Prabhala
Achal Prabhala runs the AccessIBSA project, which is an inter-disciplinary campaign for access to medicines in India, Brazil and South Africa. The AccessIBSA project began in 2016 with a Shuttleworth Fellowship, and is a consortium of researchers, lawyers and activists in India, Brazil and South Africa. Project work has ranged from identifying the error rate in implementing patent law in India to the lack of regulation over monopolies on biologics and vaccines in the country; supporting the intellectual property law reform process and identifying the contours of innovation in South Africa; and researching the cost of an EU-Mercosul Free Trade Agreement in Brazil, thereby bringing it to a halt, as well as the cost of a lax patent governance system in the country.
Over the course of the last 20 years, he has worked with civil society and governments across several countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America on pharmaceutical monopolies, and in South Africa and India, on knowledge monopolies. In the recent past, he served on the Advisory Board of the Wikimedia Foundation (2006-2018) and the Expert Advisory Group of the Medicines Patent Pool (2010-2019); he was the Carnegie Resident Equity Scholar at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 2015, and held a Shuttleworth Fellowship (2016-2019) and a Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2020. Currently, he serves on the Scientific and Technical Review Committee (STERCO) of the WHO’s mRNA Technology Transfer Program.
His ongoing research includes analysing the intellectual property and regulatory landscapes of biologics and vaccines, as well as the existing global manufacturing potential for mRNA technology. He supplements research and policy-based publications by writing about his work in popular media, most recently, in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Guardian, Project Syndicate and the Intercept Brasil, as well as popular science media such as Nature and Scientific American.