Recent news
March 2011
Increased private-sector engagement needed to develop new global health products, blog says
March 8, 2011 -- “It’s generally accepted that new incentives are needed to spur innovation in neglected tropical disease (NTD) research and development (R&D),” Andrew Robertson, chief policy officer at BIO Ventures for Global Health and a member of the Global Health Technologies Coalition steering committee, writes in a blog post. He adds, “NTDs affect more than one billion people—a large majority of whom are in the developing world—and kill about ten million people each year. However, these same people affected are often unable to afford the price of new drugs, vaccines, and diagnostics. As such, while the need is great, the market incentive alone is either insufficient or so undefined as to fail to encourage private-sector innovation.”
“Likewise, the private sector is a key contributor to innovation,” Robertson writes, adding, “But the private sector decision to pursue NTD research is, at its core, an issue of economics. Broadly speaking, global health incentives that target the private sector play a role by either reducing the costs, or increasing the rewards of a particular line of R&D.” According to Robertson, it is “important to remember that there are no silver bullets. Instead, the potential impact of these incentive mechanisms should be considered as a whole. The key objective to engaging the private sector is to transform ‘global health’ from a charity into a sustainable business.” Robertson writes that a new Results for Development report finds that tax credits—which have demonstrated “some promise in the past in promoting certain behavior among businesses”—alone “would likely not be sufficient to tip the balance between costs and rewards. But these tax credits do work to help reduce the costs of this type of research, and make the overall decision to pursue NTD R&D all the more favorable. While tax credits may only play a partial role in this transformation, in combination with other incentive mechanisms they may serve to make the global health arena more private-sector friendly. Only under these circumstances will we see long-term, meaningful investment from the private sector. Whether this is enough to tip the scale, however, is a much more complex question.” See the links below for more details.
