Pharma R&D model no help to developing countries
pharmafile | May 22, 2012 | News story | Research and Development, Sales and Marketing | HIV, MSF, Médecins Sans Frontières, R&D
Médecins Sans Frontières is urging health ministers around the world to create an ‘R&D Convention’ to ensure that pharma helps people in poorer countries.
The world’s health ministers are gathering in Geneva for the World Health Assembly (WHA) this week, and will decide whether or not to start the process for a binding agreement that would jumpstart R&D for unmet medical needs.
Today, the humanitarian medical organisation Médecins Sans Frontières – Doctors Without Borders (MSF) – will be urging health ministers to create an ‘R&D convention’ to help people in developing countries.
These unmet needs include: more effective treatments for drug-resistant tuberculosis, paediatric versions of HIV drugs, and a test to determine whether a patient with Chagas disease has been cured.
The MSF believes that pharma’s R&D model is flawed as it is predominantly driven by commercial rewards rather than health priorities.
“This means that research is steered towards areas that are the most profitable, leaving fundamental medical needs – particularly those that disproportionately affect developing countries like tropical diseases or tuberculosis – unaddressed,” the group said in a statement.
A convention would bring significant advantages, MSF says, by creating an evidence-based process to define priorities. It would also ensure that signatory countries would be bound to invest towards addressing those priorities.
MSF says that any research funded via the convention would also have the benefit of delivering accessible and affordable products.
It says this would happen by ensuring price and supply commitments, adopting flexible licensing policies for developers, and supporting open innovation that would make knowledge available to others.
The idea of forming a binding agreement comes from a report by a WHO-convened group of experts, which said it April that an R&D convention: “Is needed to secure appropriate funding and co-ordination to promote R&D needed to address the diseases that disproportionately affect developing countries and which constitute a common global responsibility.”
By passing a resolution at the WHA, governments can this week take the first step to making an R&D convention a reality, the group says.
Struggling in developing countries
The MSF said its field teams struggle to deliver quality care when appropriate medical tools do not exist.
“When drugs, diagnostics and vaccines do exist, they are often unsuitable for use in countries where MSF works, as they have been designed for resource-rich countries,” the MSF added.
Dr Tido von Schoen-Angerer, executive director of MSF’s access campaign, said: “We need to connect the research priorities with the money, to drive the money spent on medical research to where the needs are and to ensure that the fruits of innovation are affordable and accessible.
“This is where the R&D convention can bring about transformation.”
Ben Adams
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