The initial research of Ebola vaccine was published in 2003,
where it waited more than a decade for a pharmaceutical company to take notice
and invest in licensing and development. Only after the Ebola outbreak of 2014
did the US government stepped in and contributed more than $70M to develop the
vaccine. But unfortunately by the time it was ready, the outbreak was over!
Now the question that comes into play is what led to such a
situation?
"The business model is broken. The business model says
an academic or a research institute develops the technology, you publish the
paper, and you wait to license it to a major vaccine manufacturer. But who’s
going to do that for a neglected tropical disease where there is no
market?," Sabin President Dr. Peter Hotez said in
remarks at last week’s Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting.
Pharmaceutical companies routinely donate existing drugs that
can be repurposed to treat neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). But to tackle
the immense challenged posed by about 17 NTDs, affecting about a billion
people, new vaccines are required.
A pharmaceutical company is like a normal business. Without a
market that will pay for its products, new products won’t be made. One of the
effective solution to such a problem is to develop the products in the
not-profit sector, through organisations known as product development
partnerships or PDPs.
However as Ebola demonstrated, technology is only half the
battle. Development of drugs and vaccines also require significant financial
investments. This can be taken up by the set of innovative developing countries
like India, Brazil, China who can invest in developing such vaccines as a
majority of the affected people are from these major developing economies.
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