The Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) Foundation is a United Nations-supported public health organisation whose mission is to facilitate the development of and access to health solutions, particularly in low and middle income countries. We have been working with the MPP since 2020. We had developed an interactive map which you can see here.

At the end of 2020, the organisation commissioned us to develop a new website for technical and intellectual property information on selected Long-Acting Technologies: LAPaL.

The Long-Acting Technologies patents and Licenses Database ( LAPaL ) is a public database of long-acting medical technologies, their potential applications and intellectual property.

The site consists of two parts: a public database (accessible free of charge and without registration) and an entry tool for technology developers (requiring registration).

You can find more details on the objectives of LAPaL, its possible uses and its complementarity with other freely available tools, directly on the MPP website here.

The public database presents the technologies published in the input tool by the site administrators, generally in collaboration with the technology developers. Each technology (presented in the form of a sheet) is detailed in a dedicated page containing a large amount of technical information, but also bibliographic references. Information on patents and licences related to the technologies and their associated active ingredients is retrieved from the PaL database, which also includes MedsPaL, an international reference for information on intellectual property of essential medicines in low- and middle-income countries ( medspal.org).

In LAPaL, the search box allows users to search by keywords or sort technologies by different criteria. Users can explore the content of the different sheets and export the data to a pdf file.

The site also provides visitors with a range of information about the database, as well as information about new developments in the field and the possibility of subscribing to a periodic newsletter. 

This tool is intended for technology developers. It allows (after the creation of a user account) to enter information about a technology through a step-by-step form. The form allows the user to enter different descriptions, but also to categorise the technology and indicate potential fields. The form contains 22 steps to be completed by the user. The user can save the entry as a draft at any time and complete the entry in a second step.

After completing the form, the user can submit it for validation. This step is carried out by the database administrator who can validate (or reject) the information before the technology is published. This stepwise validation is also carried out when the information is updated. Indeed, the user can create a new version to be submitted to the administrator without affecting the published version.

The entry tool also has a section dedicated to the administrator. In this section, the administrator can manage all the technologies entered, and follow up publication requests, manage static data lists, FAQs and the news feed.

In most cases, the published information is entered by the technology developers themselves. However, it can also be entered by the site administrator who will then invite the technology developer to check, complete and validate it. In this case, a label indicating this conformity is displayed on the technology.

The technology input form contains a very large number of steps. Some are mandatory, others optional. We opted for the use of a module normally intended for the implementation of an "onboarding" allowing to easily manage a sequence in different steps, but also to allow the user to interrupt the input and to quickly return to the last step entered.

It was also necessary to set up a data architecture designed to be scalable, both in terms of the elements coming from the lists (managed dynamically in the administrator section), but also in the possibility of new data fields being added in future versions.

The project was developed using the PHP framework Laravel and the Vue.js framework.