[Ip-health] Washington Post Editorial: A Dose of Innovation

[Thiru Balasubramaniam]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/28/
AR2007032802052_pf.html

A Dose of Innovation
How to encourage the development of drugs for 'neglected diseases'

Thursday, March 29, 2007; A18

FOR OBVIOUS reasons, pharmaceutical companies generally don't rush to
develop drugs for use in poorer countries. These businesses face strong
financial incentives to seek profits formulating the next Viagra for
sale in developed countries with paying customers and robust patent
laws. Meanwhile, funds to buy drugs for the developing world are often
unreliable as donations follow development fads, which means that if a
drug company did decide to produce, say, a new sleeping sickness
medication for sale in impoverished nations, there is a risk that it
would not find a viable market from which it could recoup even its
research investment. That's a hard sell to shareholders.

But recently, public health experts have been experimenting with
innovative ways of encouraging research and production of medications
for so-called neglected diseases. Two such experiments have generated
results that promise to save untold numbers of lives in the developing
world.

A partnership consisting of the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative
and the Paris-based pharmaceutical company Sanofi-Aventis announced
that it has developed and will produce at cost a new anti-malaria drug.
Sanofi-Aventis agreed not to seek a patent for the medication, meaning
that generic drug manufacturers can immediately and legally produce the
medication on their own, too, which promises to suppress the drug's
already low price. Health advocates hope other pharmaceutical companies
will follow.

This may remain a unique success, however. Most of the research and
development of the new anti-malarial occurred before the partnership
was formed; the scientific breakthrough in this case was in how
Sanofi-Aventis combined two existing drugs. This made the development
relatively inexpensive. In addition, large international funds to fight
malaria all but guarantee that someone will buy the drug. Bernard
Pecoul of the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative admits that other
mechanisms and incentives may be needed to spur development of drugs
that will be more complicated -- and expensive -- to produce.

Last month a consortium of mostly European nations supported a
different approach aimed at attracting drug companies into research and
development. The consortium pledged $1.5 billion to buy a vaccine
against pneumococcus, one of the developing world's deadliest strains
of bacteria, from any company that could develop it and sell it at a
set price. Drug companies have an incentive to invest in pneumococcus
research because they are guaranteed a market if they develop the
vaccine. This strategy of pulling, rather than pushing, drug companies
into research and development is still unproven; it may not work if
prices are set too low or if the research required is too difficult.

Still, it is exciting to see governments, nongovernmental organizations
and private firms collaborate on such initiatives. One model might
prove more successful. Or each of these approaches might turn out to be
an efficient solution for different drug development tasks. Let the
experimentation continue.

---------------------------------
Thiru Balasubramaniam
Geneva Representative
Knowledge Ecology International (KEI)
voice +41.22.791.6727
fax +41.22.723.2988
mobile +41 76 508 0997
thiru@keionline.org