E-drug: Drug research and development
---------------------------------------------
Press release
Medecins Sans Frontieres calls for political intervention
DRUG COMPANIES SET WRONG PRIORITIES IN RESEARCH
Paris/Sydney, 15 October 1999. Research by the pharmaceutical industry
into new medicines for communicable diseases has virtually come to a
standstill. Communicable diseases account for 17 million deaths worldwide
each year.
Current research priorities are led by the consolidated and fiercely
competitive multinational drug industry, and have a strong bias toward
lifestyle diseases such as obesity and impotence. While communicable
diseases account for a third of annual global deaths, most of which occur
in developing countries, the industry focuses on the wealthiest
consumers to provide high returns to stockholders.
"This crisis can only be effectively addressed by the leaders of wealthy
nations who must mobilise resources that can bridge the research gap," said
Dr Bernard P�coul of MSF today at the MSF/WHO conference Drugs for
Communicable Diseases: Stimulating Development and Securing Availability,
in Paris. "It is clear that industry involvement is vital, but they are
neither willing nor able to lead this effort," said Dr P�coul.
The international health community has been looking to the drug industry to
solve this crisis. This strategy has been a failure: out of 1,233 new drugs
that came onto the market between 1975 and 1997, only 11 were for tropical
diseases.
"There has been a shift of research priorities in industry such that research
has virtually stopped for diseases like tuberculosis and malaria. These
diseases are the leading causes of death in the African, Asian and South
American countries," said Dr P�coul. "We see the implications of this
trend in the 80 countries where we work, we are forced to watch people die
because we are using ineffective treatments that were developed more than
50 years ago."
The need for new medicines is crucial as resistance to old medicines
grows. In prisons of the former Soviet Union for example, 20% of
tuberculosis patients are at risk of death because they have become
resistant to the available treatments. Despite the explosion in
tuberculosis cases there is virtually no research currently underway for
new treatments. The reason for this is clear - more than 95 % of TB victims
live in poor countries and do not represent a substantial enough market to
motivate multinational drug companies. The situation is the same for other
diseases such as malaria and sleeping sickness.
At the conference, MSF demanded that an independent expert working group
be set up to decide which treatments are the first priorities. Then wealthy
countries including members of the European Union and the USA, and
international funders (World Bank) need to step forward and fund drug
development for these diseases. MSF also recommended the drafting of a Drug
Act that would provide incentives to motivate companies to develop
treatments for communicable diseases.
Dr. Michael Toole
MSF Board Member
International Health Unit
Macfarlane Burnet Centre for Medical Research
P.O. Box 254, Fairfield, Victoria 3078
Australia
Phone: 61-3-9282-2216 (office)
Fax: 61-3-9482-3123
toole@burnet.edu.au
--
Send mail for the `E-Drug' conference to `e-drug@usa.healthnet.org'.
Mail administrative requests to `majordomo@usa.healthnet.org'.
For additional assistance, send mail to: `owner-e-drug@usa.healthnet.org'.