Vaccines don't sell themselves
Why do we need advanced market commitments for vaccines?
Consider that malaria affects more than 500 million people worldwide, and yet this past summer the Financial Times reported that French drugmaker Sanofi-Aventis faced half the demand it had expected for its anti-malaria compound artesunate. As a result, the company was contemplating destroying up to 10 million tablets of the drug.
That's from a Scientific American article this month on the difficulties of predicting market demand for vaccines in developing countries. If it's so difficult to gauge interest in a malaria drug, no wonder we see such limited attention from big pharma in diseases like river blindness, sleeping sickness, snail fever, and other neglected tropical diseases. (Via Global Health Policy blog)
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The SA article brings into perspective the massive gap in vaccine R&D. In 2004, vaccine sales were $9.9bn, only 1.8% of global pharma sales of $550bn. R&D investment, one can presume, tracked those sales.
Most health policy analysis has focused on this and the 10/90 gap as a market failure. However, vaccine research is also short-changed because industry incentives are geared towards cure, not prevention.
As I argue on my blog - http://www.planetd.org - AMCs go towards partly correcting those incentives, but are insufficient. A different perspective - of health R&D as a public good - needs to be taken, which requires stronger policy responses against the immense profitability of drug sales. This may include patent reform and other industry models, that are both unpleasant and politically incorrect, but have long-term benefits.
Posted by: Dweep Chanana | Jan 17, 2007 2:48:16 AM