[Ip-health] Final Report of the WHO Expert Working on R&D Financing published on Friday, January 15, 2010

[Thiru Balasubramaniam]

http://keionline.org/node/754

Final Report of the WHO Expert Working on R&D Financing published on
Friday, January 15, 2010
By thiru
Created 15 Jan 2010 - 1:22pm

At the proverbial 11th hour today, the World Health Organization
published the final report of the "World Health Organization Expert
Working Group on Research and Development Financing [1]" in English
three days before the commencement of the 126th session of the WHO
Executive Board on January 18, 2010. At this juncture, it does not
appear that the WHO Secretariat has made available official versions
of this Report in Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish for
Member States' consideration.

The web link to this 98 page report is here: http://www.who.int/phi/documen=
ts/RDFinancingwithISBN.pdf
  [1]

The full title of the Report is: "Research and Development -
Coordination and Financing: Report of the World Health Organization
Expert Working Group on Research and Development Financing."

The publication date is "January 2010" and the ISBN reference is: "978
92 4 156395 6" and "English" is listed under the "Languages" entry.

The acknowledgments section states the following:
The Expert Working Group acknowledges the contributions to this report
of WHO Member States, academic and research institutions, civil
society groups, funding institutions, health-related industry,
international intergovernmental organizations and other stakeholders.
These groups provided input at two web-based public hearings on new
financing proposals and also to the framework for evaluation.

This report is the product of extensive consultations. It benefited
from reports prepared by Pedro Concei=E7=E3o, Sania Nishtar and Mary Moran
with the assistance of colleagues at the George Institute for
International Health (Australia). Additional support was provided by
the Global Forum for Health Research (Switzerland). The Expert Working
Group also thanks Dr Ok Pannenberg for
technical support.

In section 4.9 on General conclusions and comments, the Report
estimates that the creation of a global health research and innovation
coordination and funding mechanism to provide funding for:
- targeted research and development for new drugs, vaccines,
diagnostics and intervention strategies for health conditions of the
poor, both communicable and noncommunicable diseases that are
prevalent in low- and middle-income countries, and for which adequate
interventions are not presently available;
=96 research primarily conducted in low- and middle-income countries
that is essential to improve health, including: health policy and
systems research, social science and behavioural research,
implementation and operational research and research on the
determinants of health. The funding would combine capacity-building
with focused research to support national health programmes, such as
health systems strengthening, improving reproductive health,
eradicating target diseases and responding to health threats such as
climate change;
=96 enhancing innovation capacity and environments in low- and middle-
income countries, to enable them to strengthen their national
innovation systems;
=96 operating a global health research observatory to ensure regular,
accurate disease monitoring and research and development resource
tracking, to provide both the input for priority setting and the means
for monitoring progress;
=95 establishment of a structure responsible for collecting, collating,
analysing, interpreting and disseminating information on funding for
research and development.

would cost US$ 3 to 15 billion per year. Footnote 1 on page 43 of the
Report states that the "figure of US$ 3 billion comes from the
Commission on Macroeconomics and Health and is likely to be much
higher now. US$ 15 billion is an approximate calculation on the basis
of the authors=92 experience in research coordination".

Source URL: http://keionline.org/node/754

Links:
[1] http://www.who.int/phi/documents/RDFinancingwithISBN.pdf


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Thiru Balasubramaniam
Geneva Representative
Knowledge Ecology International (KEI)
thiru@keionline.org


Tel: +41 22 791 6727
Mobile: +41 76 508 0997