PABS: Who Owns a Pathogen?

Why sharing the next pandemic virus could become one of the hardest bargains in global health.

A country discovers an unfamiliar virus. Scientists sequence it and realise that it may have pandemic potential; researchers elsewhere immediately want the genome, reference laboratories want physical samples, diagnostic companies want information that will allow them to develop tests, and vaccine manufacturers want material that may allow them to begin developing a vaccine. Speed matters, because every day without access potentially delays understanding of the pathogen and development of the tools needed to control it. The obvious response seems straightforward: share it. Then comes a harder question — what happens if the country that supplied the pathogen cannot obtain the vaccine subsequently developed from it?

That question sits at the centre of one of the most important unfinished parts of the new international pandemic architecture. It is called Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing, or PABS, and the principle sounds simple: countries provide rapid access to pathogens with pandemic potential and their genetic sequence information, while the benefits arising from their use are shared more fairly. Turning that principle into an international system has proved considerably more difficult. This is the difficult bargain at the centre of the WHO Pandemic Agreement, and one of the central questions in our One Health Security series on the rules of outbreaks.

The world needs the pathogen

Modern outbreak response depends on extraordinarily rapid scientific cooperation. When an unfamiliar pathogen appears, laboratories need to establish what it is; genomic sequencing allows scientists to compare isolates, monitor mutations, investigate transmission and understand how an organism relates to previously known pathogens; diagnostic developers can use sequence information to design assays; researchers can study proteins and potential drug targets; and vaccine developers may be able to begin designing candidates remarkably quickly. Physical pathogen material can also remain essential for laboratory research, validation and assay development. The faster relevant material and information become available, the faster the international scientific system can begin responding — which creates a strong collective interest in sharing, because an outbreak occurring within one country’s territory can rapidly become everybody’s problem. But the benefits produced from shared pathogens do not necessarily travel back through the international system as efficiently as the pathogen information travelled out.

COVID exposed the imbalance

COVID-19 demonstrated the extraordinary capabilities of global science: the SARS-CoV-2 genome was shared rapidly, diagnostics were developed, vaccines were produced at unprecedented speed, and new therapeutics followed. The scientific response was remarkable — but access was much less equal. Wealthier countries were able to secure large quantities of early vaccine production through advance purchase agreements, while many lower-income countries waited considerably longer for meaningful access, and manufacturing capacity was geographically concentrated. The world therefore demonstrated that it could share biological information globally while distributing some of the benefits arising from that information very unevenly.

That creates a long-term problem for outbreak governance. If the international system repeatedly tells countries to share their pathogens immediately because the world needs them, while the subsequent experience is that the products developed arrive much later, if at all, then pathogen sharing begins to look less like cooperation and more like extraction. That is not a stable foundation for pandemic preparedness.

This problem predates COVID

The tension between pathogen sharing and benefit sharing is not new. A particularly important episode occurred in 2007, when Indonesia stopped routinely sharing H5N1 avian-influenza virus samples through the WHO system, with Indonesian officials arguing that viruses supplied for global surveillance could be used by manufacturers to develop vaccines that affected countries might subsequently struggle to afford. The dispute forced the international health community to confront an uncomfortable question: who benefits when a country shares a dangerous pathogen?

The eventual result was the Pandemic Influenza Preparedness (PIP) Framework, adopted by the World Health Assembly in 2011, which created a specialised system connecting the sharing of influenza viruses with human pandemic potential to access-and-benefit-sharing arrangements involving manufacturers and other participants. It remains an important precedent — but it applies specifically to influenza viruses with human pandemic potential, and the next pandemic pathogen may not be influenza. PABS attempts to create a broader architecture.

Article 12 of the Pandemic Agreement

The WHO Pandemic Agreement was adopted by the World Health Assembly on 20 May 2025, and Article 12 establishes the intention to create a multilateral system for access and benefit sharing for pathogens with pandemic potential — the PABS System. Its ambition is substantial: the system is intended to provide rapid, timely and equitable sharing of materials and sequence information concerning pathogens with pandemic potential, and, in return, rapid, timely, fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from their use. Those two sides are deliberately linked. This is not simply a pathogen database accompanied by a separate aid programme; access and benefit sharing are meant to form one system, operating on an equal footing.

What counts as a pathogen with pandemic potential?

This is already an important governance question, because the international system cannot realistically treat every microorganism as though it were a potential pandemic pathogen requiring the full PABS architecture, so the concept needs a sufficiently clear scope. A pathogen may become relevant because of its ability to infect humans, its transmissibility, severity, immune escape, a lack of available countermeasures or other characteristics suggesting substantial potential for international spread and serious public-health consequences — yet those characteristics are often uncertain precisely when rapid sharing matters most. The system therefore has to operate under uncertainty: set the threshold too high and potentially important pathogens may remain outside the system until valuable time has been lost; set it too low and laboratories may be expected to process large numbers of organisms through a specialised international mechanism unnecessarily. This is another example of a problem that recurs throughout this series — a threshold intended to organise action can itself become a source of governance latency.

The physical sample and the digital genome

PABS also has to govern two very different things. The first is pathogen material: a physical virus, bacterium or other biological sample exists somewhere, and it can be stored, transferred, cultured, destroyed or subjected to laboratory controls. The second is genetic sequence information: once a pathogen has been sequenced, its informational representation can travel globally almost instantly, and researchers may be able to begin substantial work without ever receiving the physical pathogen. That difference is fundamental, because international access-and-benefit-sharing law developed largely around physical genetic resources, whereas modern outbreak science increasingly operates through digital information. PABS therefore has to connect biological material and digital sequence information within one governance framework without pretending they behave identically — a tension our analysis of one pathogen moving through four legal systems follows in detail.

Why sequence information matters so much

Suppose a novel respiratory virus appears tomorrow. Within hours of sequencing, scientists may be able to identify its likely receptor interactions, compare it with known viruses and begin designing diagnostic primers; vaccine developers using adaptable platforms may begin work from sequence information; computational researchers can examine protein structures; and surveillance laboratories elsewhere can compare their own unexplained cases against the new genome. This speed is one of the greatest advantages modern science has against emerging pathogens, so any governance system that significantly delays sequence sharing could impose a substantial health-security cost. Yet excluding sequence information entirely from benefit-sharing arrangements creates another problem: a company might derive considerable commercial value from biological information without ever requesting the original physical sample, so a benefit-sharing system limited to tubes crossing borders could govern an increasingly small part of modern biological innovation. PABS has to solve both problems simultaneously.

What does the provider receive?

This is where the word benefit becomes important, because benefits do not necessarily have to consist only of money: they can include access to vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics, as well as technology transfer, training, scientific collaboration, research capacity, manufacturing capability and other forms of support. For pandemic preparedness, however, access to health products is particularly important. Article 12 of the adopted Pandemic Agreement envisages participating manufacturers entering into legally binding contracts with WHO, so that during a pandemic emergency those manufacturers would provide WHO with rapid access to a proportion of their real-time production of relevant vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics. The Agreement sets a target of 20 per cent of real-time production — with at least 10 per cent provided as a donation and the remainder made available at affordable prices, taking account of manufacturers’ circumstances — which WHO could then allocate according to public-health risks and needs. This is an attempt to make equity operational rather than rhetorical.

Twenty per cent sounds simple until production begins

Imagine that a manufacturer can produce 100 million vaccine doses during the first months of a pandemic. In principle, the PABS commitment could make a significant proportion available through WHO — but immediately the practical questions begin. When does the obligation activate? Which products count? What happens when production capacity changes? How are products priced? How quickly can WHO allocate them? How are countries prioritised? How do regulatory approvals affect distribution? What happens if essential raw materials are scarce? How does the mechanism interact with contracts the manufacturer has already signed with governments? And what happens when a manufacturer uses PABS information indirectly rather than receiving a physical pathogen through a designated laboratory? A percentage does not by itself create an equitable supply system; the contractual and operational machinery matters enormously, which is one reason the PABS annex remains difficult to negotiate.

The laboratory network matters too

PABS cannot operate solely as an agreement between governments and pharmaceutical companies, because laboratories sit at the centre: pathogens are detected, characterised, sequenced, stored and transferred through laboratory networks. The PABS system therefore needs arrangements governing which laboratories participate, how materials move between them, what biosafety and biosecurity requirements apply, how sequence information is shared and how compliance is recorded. The July 2026 negotiating round specifically continued work on the PABS laboratory network and contractual arrangements — which is not administrative detail, because the laboratory network is where the legal principle becomes an operational system. If laboratories do not understand how to share material quickly, PABS will create friction precisely where it is supposed to create speed.

The system also needs manufacturers

The other side of the architecture involves companies capable of turning biological information into useful products, which creates a difficult relationship between public-health objectives and commercial incentives. Developing vaccines and therapeutics can require enormous investment, manufacturing facilities are expensive, and many candidate products fail, so companies need predictable rules and viable commercial models. At the same time, pandemic products can become essential public goods during an international emergency: a manufacturer cannot be treated exactly like a humanitarian organisation, nor can access to life-saving products during a pandemic depend entirely on which government can pay the most. PABS is attempting to establish the bargain before the emergency occurs — which is exactly what preparedness should do.

What about companies that do not participate?

This is one of the difficult design questions. A voluntary system may attract responsible manufacturers while allowing others to benefit from shared pathogen information without accepting comparable benefit-sharing obligations, whereas a highly restrictive system might discourage participation, complicate research or create incentives to obtain information elsewhere. The effectiveness of PABS therefore depends partly on whether participation becomes sufficiently broad that the system establishes a genuine international norm, which is where the relationship with databases, laboratories, funders, regulators and governments becomes important. PABS is not simply a contract; it is an attempt to construct an ecosystem of incentives.

Is the pathogen really owned by the country?

The title of this article deliberately asks a provocative question — who owns a pathogen? — and the legal answer is more complicated than ordinary ownership. The Convention on Biological Diversity recognises the sovereign rights of states over their natural resources and provides the broader international foundation for access and benefit sharing concerning genetic resources, and the Nagoya Protocol develops that architecture. But pathogens create unusual circumstances: a pathogen may emerge in one country while circulating in wildlife spanning several borders; a virus may be detected first in Country A even though its evolutionary history extends elsewhere; a human sample contains both biological information about the pathogen and sensitive information connected with the person from whom it was collected; and a sequence can subsequently exist everywhere. The language of simple ownership therefore becomes inadequate. The more useful question is what rights and obligations should arise when one country provides biological resources or information that become valuable to global health — and that is what PABS is really trying to answer. (When exactly a dangerous pathogen becomes a “genetic resource” under biodiversity law is a question we return to elsewhere in this series.)

One Health makes the problem harder

Now imagine that our pathogen did not begin in a human, but in poultry, pigs, bats or another wildlife species. The first useful samples may have been collected through veterinary surveillance, animal-health laboratories may have generated the first sequence, and environmental researchers may have identified related viruses — and then human infection occurs. Which material enters PABS? At what point does an animal pathogen become a pathogen with pandemic potential? Who has authority to share material originally collected under an animal-health surveillance programme? And how does the PABS architecture interact with WOAH systems and national veterinary authorities? These are not peripheral questions, because many serious pandemic threats are zoonotic, so a pathogen-sharing system designed primarily around human clinical samples would miss part of the biological system it is intended to govern.

The first signal may belong to somebody else

This is where PABS connects directly to the One Health governance gap, because the international pandemic system may ultimately need a pathogen that was discovered outside the human-health system. The farmer may have generated the first signal; a veterinary surgeon may have collected the first sample; an animal-health laboratory may have produced the first genome; a wildlife surveillance project may hold the closest known relatives; and an environmental programme may reveal geographical spread. The international benefit-sharing architecture therefore needs interfaces with systems that were not created primarily for pandemic preparedness. The question is not simply whether WHO can obtain a virus; it is whether the biological evidence surrounding that virus can move across institutional boundaries without losing provenance, trust or time.

Provenance matters

Rapid sharing does not mean abandoning information about where biological material came from — quite the opposite, because the scientific value of a pathogen can depend heavily on its provenance: which host, which location, which date, which clinical presentation, which epidemiological circumstances, what processing occurred before sequencing, and what other samples are related. Good pathogen governance therefore requires both speed and provenance, because a sequence detached from its biological and epidemiological context may be considerably less useful. This is another reason future PABS infrastructure should connect naturally with One Health surveillance rather than operate as an isolated repository.

The trust problem

Ultimately, PABS is a trust mechanism. Provider countries need confidence that sharing will not disadvantage them; researchers need confidence that legitimate scientific work will not become trapped in unpredictable bureaucracy; manufacturers need confidence that contractual obligations are clear; governments need confidence that products made available through the system will be allocated according to genuine public-health need; communities need confidence that biological resources collected from them or their environments are not simply being extracted for somebody else’s benefit; and WHO needs confidence that participants will honour the system when the political and commercial pressure of a real pandemic begins. The entire architecture therefore depends on something that cannot be manufactured during an emergency: as we have argued elsewhere, trust is biosecurity infrastructure, and it has to exist beforehand.

The governance-latency test

We can apply the same test used throughout this series. Imagine a novel zoonotic virus is identified on Monday, its genome is available on Tuesday, and physical isolates are ready for international transfer on Wednesday. How long does it take before qualified laboratories can access them? How long before manufacturers can begin legitimate product development? How long before everyone understands the benefit-sharing obligations? If those questions require weeks of legal negotiation, the system has failed one of its primary preparedness objectives. But now reverse the test: a vaccine is developed six months later — how long does it take before countries that provided the pathogen can access it? If pathogen information moved globally in 24 hours while the resulting vaccine takes a year to reach the countries that enabled its development, the system has failed from the other direction. PABS therefore has two forms of governance latency, access latency and benefit latency, and a successful system has to reduce both.

What should a good PABS system achieve?

The final annex should be judged against several practical tests. It should allow rapid scientific access to relevant pathogen materials and sequence information; provide predictable rules, so laboratories and manufacturers do not negotiate fundamental terms during an emergency; preserve provenance, keeping material and information connected with their biological and epidemiological origins; create meaningful benefits rather than vague promises of future cooperation; recognise the importance of animal and environmental surveillance in identifying pathogens with pandemic potential; avoid creating incentives to withhold information; and avoid creating routes through which commercial users can benefit from globally shared pathogen information while systematically avoiding benefit-sharing obligations. Above all, the system should be credible before it is tested by a pandemic.

Sharing has to work in both directions

Global health security depends on countries sharing biological information — that is unavoidable, because a pathogen emerging anywhere can eventually threaten people everywhere — but cooperation cannot sustainably operate in only one direction. The scientific system cannot expect biological material and genomic information to move rapidly from countries experiencing outbreaks while accepting that vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics move back according primarily to purchasing power; that imbalance damages both equity and preparedness. Countries that trust the system have stronger incentives to participate quickly, while countries that believe sharing exposes them to risk without meaningful benefit have stronger reasons to hesitate. PABS is therefore not charity attached to pathogen surveillance. Benefit sharing is part of the surveillance architecture itself.

So who owns the pathogen?

Perhaps that is the wrong question. A pandemic pathogen is simultaneously a biological threat, a scientific resource and potentially the starting point for products of enormous public value: no country can safely treat it as though its consequences end at the national border, and the international community cannot safely treat it as though the country that supplied it has no continuing interest in what happens next. The more useful principle is reciprocity — countries share because rapid access protects everyone, and the international system shares the benefits because cooperation has to protect everyone too. That is the bargain PABS is trying to construct. Whether Member States can turn that principle into a system laboratories trust, manufacturers will join and countries believe is fair remains unresolved, so the negotiations continuing in 2026 concern much more than the technical wording of an annex. They are deciding whether, during the next pandemic threat, the pathogen and the benefits derived from it will finally be able to travel through the same global system.

Related One Health Security analysis

This piece is part of our Rules of Outbreaks series on global health law. It follows The WHO Pandemic Agreement (of which PABS is Article 12), and connects to Who Governs a Global Outbreak? (the architecture) and The International Health Regulations (the backbone).

Correct at the time of writing (August 2026): the Pandemic Agreement was adopted in May 2025, but its Article 12 PABS annex remained under negotiation, with the next session scheduled for 14–18 September 2026.

Questions & Answers

References and further reading

1. World Health Assembly (2025). WHO Pandemic Agreement — Article 12: Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing System. Adopted 20 May 2025.
2. World Health Organization (2025). World Health Assembly adopts historic Pandemic Agreement. 20 May 2025.
3. World Health Organization. Pandemic Influenza Preparedness (PIP) Framework — the 2011 precedent for connecting pathogen sharing with benefit sharing.
4. World Health Organization (2026). Member States continue negotiations on the PABS annex. 20 July 2026.