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Every April 26th, World Intellectual Property (IP) Day marks a time to celebrate the creativity and innovation that fuel our economy. In 2025, the spotlight is on music—a universal language that connects people, culture and moments. But what if you couldn’t hear it? What if the joy of music was locked away, not by choice, but by biology?
As we honor the artists who craft soundtracks for our lives, it’s also worth celebrating the scientists and inventors working to ensure everyone has the chance to hear them. From headphones to streaming platforms, IP has long supported innovation in how we make and share music – but it also plays a powerful role for the researchers and scientists who are working to be able to restore the ability to hear it.
Music: A gift worth protecting
Music is more than entertainment. It’s a way to express emotion, shape identity and even heal. Whether it’s a mother’s lullaby or a stadium concert, sound plays a central role in the human experience for many. But for millions of people with sensorineural hearing loss - a type of hearing loss that occurs due to damage to the inner ear, that experience can be out of reach. Hearing loss affects how people connect—not just to others, but to culture, to beauty and to themselves. That’s why the quest to restore hearing is one of the most meaningful frontiers in medicine today.
Restoring hearing through gene therapy
Founded in 2016 and now part of Lilly, Akouos is leading a new era in precision genetic medicine for hearing loss. Its lead candidate in development is a gene therapy designed to restore hearing in individuals born with mutations in the OTOF gene—a condition that leaves them profoundly deaf from birth.
Using cutting-edge viral vectors engineered to deliver healthy gene copies directly to the inner ear, the company is aiming to translate promising science into potential cures, and none of it would be possible without robust IP protections.
IP protections, including patent rights, help enable companies like Akouos to pursue the type of high-risk and costly research programs required to discover, develop, and deliver innovative treatments and cures to patients. These protections help ensure that the risk and rigor of science are met with the resources needed to keep advancing, and pave the way for generic and biosimilar competition when those IP protections that enabled the initial innovation expire.
“At Akouos, IP doesn’t just protect our discoveries—it enables them, giving us the runway to pursue transformative therapies that could allow people to experience sound for the very first time."
— Manny Simons, Sr. VP, Gene Therapy, Lilly
Celebrating Innovation, Protecting Possibility
At the end of the day, IP doesn’t just protect the melodies written by songwriters—it also supports the breakthroughs that allow people to hear those melodies in the first place. Whether in a studio or a lab, creators need protection and recognition to keep creating. The biopharmaceutical world, like the music world, thrives on ideas—and IP is the bridge that turns ideas into impact.
On World IP Day 2025, let’s celebrate the harmony between art and science. Let’s recognize that IP can empower a composer to share a song and also empower a scientist to help someone hear it for the first time.
Thanks to innovation protected by IP, the music doesn’t have to stop—it can start anew.
Andrew Powaleny
Andrew Powaleny is the Deputy Vice President of Public Affairs at PhRMA, where he leads communications on scientific, regulatory and intellectual property issues, highlighting the biopharmaceutical industry’s efforts in developing innovative medicines and vaccines while promoting an environment that encourages necessary risk-taking. For five years starting in 2019, he launched and led PhRMA’s grassroots initiative, Voters for Cures, bringing patients and caregivers together to advocate for access to medicine and biopharmaceutical innovation. He also co-founded and co-chaired PRIDE Umbrella, a resource group for LGBTQ+ individuals. Prior to joining PhRMA in 2015, Andrew worked as a communications consultant in Washington, D.C., and as Deputy Press Secretary for the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce under Chairman Fred Upton. He holds a degree in public policy and government from Eastern Connecticut State University, with a minor in music. Outside of work, Andrew enjoys exercise, musical theater and mentoring college students through The Fund for American Studies alumni association.
Andrew Powaleny
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