Tom Kalil, President Clinton's former science and tech adviser who is currently advising UC Berkeley's chancellor, co-wrote a great op/ed in today's San Francisco Chronicle about how to create a market for vaccines against diseases that predominantly affect poor people. See, really poor people aren't seen as a particularly lucrative market, so the biopharma industry doesn't spend too much R&D money on their specific problems. From the editorial, co-written with Bruce Mehlman:
Every year, more than 6 million people die from AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria alone. Today, there are no effective vaccines for these and many other diseases of the poor. That's because low-income countries have average health budgets of $17 to $36 per person, and can only afford to spend pennies per dose on vaccines. As a result, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies have little incentive to develop these life-saving vaccines. In fact, only 10 percent of the world's health research and development is devoted to diseases that afflict 90 percent of the world's population.
Fortunately, there is an innovative policy solution that could dramatically boost industry investment in R&D and production of vaccines for the poor. Under this proposal, wealthy nations would make markets for vaccines by committing to purchase a specific number of doses at a specific price. For example, they might commit to buy 200 million doses of a malaria vaccine at $15 per dose, with developing countries contributing a modest co-pay. Economists and public-health experts have estimated that such a commitment would save lives at a mere $15 per life-year, an extraordinarily cost-effective way to improve the human condition.
