WSJ Article: "Why a Market-Driven Vaccine Plan Faces Big Obstacles"

I caught an interesting article this morning on the second page of the Wall Street Journal. Written by Nick Timiraos, it is entitled "Why a Market-Driven Vaccine Plan Faces Big Obstacles". Its a summary outlook on the recent developments concerning how to complete the development of vaccines whose major customer base is located in developing countries (i.e the poorest of the poor). The article link is here.

Its a great case study of bring together publicy-owned corporations with Global Health organizations in an attempt accomplish the objectives of both: 1) maximize shareholder profit for the former and 2) decrease disease morbidity and mortality for the latter. Of course there are other entities involved (countries, individuals etc) but objectives for pretty much all boil down to one of these two. As the Global Health community moves ahead, we should definitely look to these situations as great opportunities (let's not view them simply as challenges) to accomplish these multiple and seemingly opposing objectives. Time to think creatively for everyone.

As Timiraos points out, there are definitely many obstacles but its great that we are in a position to be discussing these obstacles rather than still arguing futilely that pharma should be paying attention to these diseases. Publicy-owned corporations will, for at least some time into the future, be driven by a single objective and need to know that enough profit exists at the end of the tunnel for them to pursue this research. Failure rates for drug research are incredibly high (There is a 17% success rate if a molecule passes phase 1, pre-phase 1, its 1 in 10000 from this reference
so this needs to be taken into account when we work together with pharma and biotech companies. Perhaps the best use of our money is on drug research which has been shelved not for health reasons but for economic reasons. In fact this is a focus of Institute for OneWorld Health which is a non-profit pharmaceutical company that looks for promising drug candidates which were shelved for lack of a viable market. Its a great idea and one which could be integrated into this larger strategy if OneWorld is not involved already.

A cheers to WSJ as well for putting this article in a prominent position and drawing attention to these strategies and the Business and Global Health communities continue to forge new partnerships together.