A new track towards drug development The patent system gives pharmaceutical companies an exclusivity period on newly-developed drugs, yet this can mean that drugs are priced beyond the reach of poorer populations. The REWARD project is investigating a performance-based reward mechanism to encourage pharmaceutical innovation and help bring drugs to more of the people who need them, as Professor Thomas Pogge explains. The
pharmaceutical
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has an important role to play in helping to raise health standards across the world by developing new drugs, yet at the same time companies are of course keen to maximise profits. Pharmaceutical companies invest a lot of time, money and expertise in research, and it often takes a long time before a new drug reaches the market. “It takes several years before you see any return on the initial investment, while clinical trials are also extremely expensive,” points out Thomas Pogge, Professor of Political Philosophy at the Universities of Central Lancashire and Yale in the US. Under the existing Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) system, pharmaceutical companies get 20 years of exclusivity on a patented drug, which provides an incentive to invest in research and development, yet this is rarely targeted at those diseases that mainly affect the world’s poor. “Some diseases do a lot of damage but they are not lucrative areas of R & D, as the patients who have these diseases tend overwhelmingly to be poor,” explains Professor Pogge. “Another point is that profitability is not really well-correlated with urgency. For example, it may be very profitable for a company to create a drug
to treat a disease for which a good drug is already available.”
REWARD project These issues lie at the core of Professor Pogge’s work in the Health Impact Fund (HIF) and the REWARD project, an ERC-funded initiative which brings together researchers from several disciplines to investigate restructuring the way pharmaceutical companies are rewarded. The current IPR system helps
his colleagues in the project are looking at a new payment mechanism. “We want to establish a second track, beside the usual monopoly-pricing track. On this second track, a pharmaceutical company can engage in research and development of a new medicine, and be rewarded in a wholly new way,” he says. “The company would sell the drug at the cost of production and distribution, and get a reward from public funds proportional to its health impact. We are looking at
Even in the richest markets there are mis-matches between the drug that’s best suited to a particular patient and the drug that a patient actually gets companies recoup their initial investment in R & D through patent-protected high prices, yet this can mean drugs are priced beyond the reach of poorer populations, while there are also insufficient incentives to encourage companies to investigate those diseases which primarily affect these populations. It’s also important to consider the increasingly heavy burden that high prices place on healthcare systems in affluent countries; a new approach is required to close these gaps, believes Professor Pogge, now he and
how to measure the health gains from the introduction of a new drug, for the purpose of rewarding the introducing company in proportion to the health impact.” There are two main components to this work, the first of which is the metric to be used in assessing the health impact of a new drug on the wider population. Thomas Pogge and his colleagues are using quality-adjusted life years (QALY) for this purpose, a measure that is commonly used in global burden of disease studies. “When a person’s life finishes, we can Partners in the REWARD project discuss ways of promoting community engagement in health planning, provision and monitoring.
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