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ESSAYS ON RESEARCH -- INNOVATION AND ACCESS TO MEDICINES FOR NEGLECTED POPULATIONS

Wednesday, 19th of June 2013

• ESSAYS ON RESEARCH -- INNOVATION AND ACCESS TO MEDICINES FOR NEGLECTED POPULATIONS

Citation: Moon S, Bermudez J, t Hoen E (2012) Innovation and Access to Medicines for Neglected Populations: Could a Treaty Address a Broken Pharmaceutical R&D System? PLoS Med 9(5): e1001218. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001218

Published: May 15, 2012

Copyright: © 2012 Moon et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: No specific funding was received for writing this article.

Competing interests: SM is a member of the Board of Directors of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF)/Doctors Without Borders-USA and the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative-North America. ETH was the executive director of the Medicines Patent Pool from November 2010 until 1 May 2012. SM has been a consultant to the Medicines Patent Pool. All other authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Abbreviations: ARV, antiretroviral; CEWG, WHO Consultative Expert Working Group on R&D: Financing and Coordination; DNDi, Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative; LMIC, low- and middle-income country; MMV, Medicines for Malaria Venture; PDP, product development partnership; R&D, research and development; TRIPS, Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights; WHO, World Health Organization; WTO, World Trade Organization

Provenance: Commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

Summary Points Below; full text is at http://www.ploscollections.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001218

The current system for the research and development (R&D) of new medicines does not adequately meet the needs of the majority of the worlds population.

There is a lack of new medicines for the “neglected diseases”—those that primarily affect populations with little purchasing power, and therefore offer an insufficient incentive for industry to invest in R&D. However, with problems extending far beyond the narrow notion of neglected diseases, the issue is better understood as one of “neglected populations.”

International debate and proposals for reform have ensued, including the recommendation that governments begin negotiations over a binding medical R&D convention to address systematic, long-standing problems with innovation and globally equitable access to medicines. Despite the emergence of many new approaches to generating R&D that meets the needs of poorer populations, efforts remain ad hoc, fragmented, and insufficient.

We discuss how an R&D treaty could complement and build on existing initiatives by addressing four areas where the system remains particularly weak: affordability, sustainable financing, efficiency in innovation, and equitable health-centered governance.

We argue that effective tools for global governance are required to generate medical R&D as a global public good, based on the understanding that a politically and financially sustainable system will require both fair contributions from all, and fair benefit-sharing for all.