[Ip-health] Boston Globe: Biotech -- Not Just For the Rich

[Michael Steffen]

See below the top editorial in yesterday's Boston Globe.

Michael Steffen
Executive Director
Universities Allied for Essential Medicines


> GLOBE EDITORIAL
> Biotech: Not just for the rich
>
> May 8, 2007
>
> BEHIND THE vibrancy of the life sciences industry so visible at the
> 2007 BIO convention this week in Boston is a sobering statistic
> from the World Health Organization: Each year, 10 million people in
> poor nations die because they lack access to existing medicines or
> vaccines. In his keynote address yesterday, Michael J. Fox, the
> actor and founder of a Parkinson's disease research foundation,
> said that of the 30,000 known human diseases, there are treatments
> for just 10,000. Many of the diseases without treatments afflict
> residents of resource-poor countries, which draw little interest
> from drug makers.
>
> This is a challenge for biotech that goes beyond finding life-
> extending medications for cancer victims or a drug to encourage the
> good cholesterol, as important as such advances would be. In much
> of the world, preventable or treatable illnesses like tuberculosis
> and cervical cancer are still major killers. In his videotaped
> remarks to BIO yesterday, Senator Edward Kennedy called for one
> approach to this imbalance in the world's access to the fruits of
> biotechnology. His reform legislation for the Food and Drug
> Administration includes a plan for accelerated FDA review of drug
> candidates for tropical diseases.
>
> Last year, Senator Patrick Leahy sponsored a bill to ensure that
> medical technologies developed at federally funded labs would be
> available not just to branded drug makers but also to low-cost
> generic drug makers serving developing countries. This is also the
> goal of a student group called Universities Allied For Essential
> Medicines. It wants research universities that hold rights to new
> medical discoveries to license them to branded drug makers with the
> condition that they be usable by generic makers in developing
> countries.
>
> When generic makers are granted these rights, neither the
> universities nor the pharmaceutical companies lose substantial
> revenues, since the patented, branded versions of the drugs are
> usually unaffordable in low-income countries. At a UAEM meeting at
> Harvard last month, Dr. Jim Kim, the former AIDS director for WHO
> and now chairman of the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard
> Medical School, urged students to pressure universities to insist
> on making their technology accessible to the poor.
>
> The benefits of medical advances from earlier generations could
> also save lives with more support from the West and from the
> developing countries themselves. In a report released this week,
> Save the Children says that 400,000 children die each year of
> measles, which can be prevented by a 15-cent vaccine. "We must lead
> in compassion as we have led in innovation," Kennedy told the BIO
> audience. Researchers, drug company executives, and elected
> officials should seek all possible ways to make the miracles of
> medicine the birthright of all, not just the rich.
>
>
>
> http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/
> articles/2007/05/08/biotech_not_just_for_the_rich/