Stiglitz on Patents and Health R&D

The topic of Advanced Market Commitments has been in the news recently, with several weighty proponents pushing it as a way to close the global drug research gap, particularly for vaccines. Now, Joseph Stiglitz has a very interesting article on patents, “prize funds”, and the problems of both. Reading it is particularly rewarding because it [...]

Advance Market Commitment for Vaccines takes off: A Partial Solution

Crossposted from the THDBlog.
CGDev reported on Monday (also covered in BW) that some G7 nations, together with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have agreed to provide an advance market commitment of $1.5 billion for purchase of vaccines against pneumococcal disease. Why is this commitment important?
By promising in advance to pay for life-saving vaccines once they are [...]

New Drug Developments point to New Industry Model

Three interesting pieces of news in the pharmaceutical industry, reported yesterday on IHT and the Wall Street Journal Europe, point to an emerging trend in drug development and R&D.

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The Relation between Health and GNP: India and China

Greg Mankiw points to a Google tool (from Gapminder) plotting per capita GNP and life expectancy of several countries over time. I presume it is supposed to show the strong correlation between economic growth and improvements in health, but I noticed some problems with.
Insufficient Correlation between Health and GNP
As a patriotic Indian I first compared [...]

News Nuggets: Manufacturing Cheap Vaccines, Ayurveda, and Bioprospecting Breakthroughs

Three interesting health-related news, all from alternative media.
Vaccine Manufacture Breakthrough
The Voice of America is reporting (also reported on THDBlog and in India) that Henry Daniell of the University of Central Florida has achieved a breakthrough to manufacture existing vaccines by genetically engineering plants. The new process skips existing processes, cutting costs substantially and allows vaccines [...]

MSF Starts Petition against Novartis’ Legal Challenge in India

SciDev.net reports that Médecins Sans Frontières has launched a petition against the court case by Novartis against the Indian government (see previous post for details of the case).
Aid organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) is collecting signatures against a lawsuit filed by pharmaceutical company Novartis. The court case is scheduled for 29 January in [...]

Ethical Pharmaceutical Collaboration: A Catch-22 for Patent Law

The Guardian is reporting that British scientists have found ways to create drugs at a fraction of the cost of big pharma’s development costs:
Sunil Shaunak, professor of infectious diseases at Imperial College, based at Hammersmith hospital, calls their revolutionary new model “ethical pharmaceuticals”.
Improvements they devise to the molecular structure of an existing, expensive drug turn [...]

Vaccine Demand Forecasting: Creating Markets and Incentives

The PSD Blog and CGD’s Global Health Policy Blog mention a Scientific American article on the need for and initiatives to forecast the demand for vaccines. The problem this work addresses is what happens in the absence of well-defined markets:
Unpredictable demand creates a three-way catch-22 problem, as pointed out in a 2002 study commissioned by [...]