Hello and welcome everyone to this online conversation hosted by the European Centre for International Political Economy, on the economic and broader societal value of intellectual property or or IP, for the EU and its member states.

My name is Jackie Davis, and today I'm very pleased to welcome Natalie Mole to this conversation.

Natalie is Director General of FPA, the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations.

The recent ESApe study on the benefits

of intellectual property rights in EU free trade agreements shows that the pharmaceutical industry

is the most IP intensive sector in the EU economy. So I'm delighted to have the opportunity

to talk to Natalie about the relevance and importance of intellectual property for an innovative pharmaceutical industry in particular and for healthcare in general.

Natalie, a very warm welcome to the podcast.

Natalie, in another podcast for this series, I spoke to Louisa Santos of Business Europe,

and we talked about the EU's industrial strategy and its relationship to this whole issue

of IP rights. But your sector has another strategy also to look at, the pharmaceutical

strategy. How important are both of these strategies for the pharmaceutical sector and how do you see the

connection between the two?

Well, thank you very much, Jackie, and it's a pleasure to be here.

It's also a pleasure to be working in this sector at this moment in time where indeed, as

you mentioned, the European Union has an industrial strategy, a very ambitious one, and at

the same time, a pharmaceutical strategy one, and at the same time,

a pharmaceutical strategy that is supposed to fit into that, that includes also a review of all

our legislation for the first time in 20 years. So it's true that we focus very much on the

pharmaceutical strategy because it has the dual objectives of ensuring a strong competitive

pharma industry as well as improving access

to medicines in Europe. But we also look at the industrial strategy because of course it's looking

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