Incentives sought for drug companies

WASHINGTON – Companies that develop drugs to treat diseases of poor countries such as malaria should be rewarded with vouchers that might speed up government review of far more lucrative drugs, researchers proposed this week.

Another set of researchers suggested that rich countries subsidise the use of the most effective drugs to fight malaria in poorer nations. Both reports, published in the journal Health Affairs, are aimed at finding ways to eradicate easy-to-treat diseases that persist because there is little profit in fighting them.AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis kill between six million and seven million people a year, depending on estimates, and other diseases such as tetanus, lymphatic filariasis and Chagas disease kill hundreds of thousands more and disable millions.Yet of more than 1 500 new health products marketed globally between 1975 and 2004, only 20 were to fight tropical diseases and tuberculosis, the group Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders) reported in January.And the single biggest-selling prescription drug in the world, Lipitor, fights high cholesterol.There could be a way to remedy this problem, say David Ridley, Henry Grabowski, and Jeffrey Moe of Duke University in North Carolina.”We propose that developers of treatments for neglected diseases receive a ‘priority review voucher,’” they wrote.”The voucher could save an average of one year of US Food and Drug Administration review and be sold by the developer to the manufacturer of a blockbuster drug.In a well-functioning market, the voucher would speed access to highly valued treatments.”The researchers said the FDA awards priority status to drugs according to their perceived novelty.”In the 1990s, 14 of 29 ‘blockbuster’ drugs (those with sales of US$1 billion in their fifth year on the market) were classified as priority,” they wrote.- Nampa-ReutersBoth reports, published in the journal Health Affairs, are aimed at finding ways to eradicate easy-to-treat diseases that persist because there is little profit in fighting them.AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis kill between six million and seven million people a year, depending on estimates, and other diseases such as tetanus, lymphatic filariasis and Chagas disease kill hundreds of thousands more and disable millions.Yet of more than 1 500 new health products marketed globally between 1975 and 2004, only 20 were to fight tropical diseases and tuberculosis, the group Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders) reported in January.And the single biggest-selling prescription drug in the world, Lipitor, fights high cholesterol.There could be a way to remedy this problem, say David Ridley, Henry Grabowski, and Jeffrey Moe of Duke University in North Carolina.”We propose that developers of treatments for neglected diseases receive a ‘priority review voucher,’” they wrote.”The voucher could save an average of one year of US Food and Drug Administration review and be sold by the developer to the manufacturer of a blockbuster drug.In a well-functioning market, the voucher would speed access to highly valued treatments.”The researchers said the FDA awards priority status to drugs according to their perceived novelty.”In the 1990s, 14 of 29 ‘blockbuster’ drugs (those with sales of US$1 billion in their fifth year on the market) were classified as priority,” they wrote.- Nampa-Reuters