Nobel-winning group launches not-for-profit drug industry

MUMBAI: Over 32,000 people die every day in developing countries due to infectious diseases. While these illnesses make up 90 per cent of the global disease burden, they get only 10 per cent of research money. As a result, in the past 25 years, of the 1,393 new chemical entities that came on the market, only 1 per cent (13 drugs) were for tropical infectious diseases.
It is to end this ``crisis of neglected diseases'''' that the Nobel-winning organisation, Medecins Sans Frontieres, has launched an ambitious effort to develop and produce drugs for poor people in developing countries. Through its programme called the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative, it hopes to create a drug industry that will respond to ``public need rather than share price''''.
Commercial drug companies often don''t invest resources on diseases which affect only poor people because the drugs generally cannot command high prices or yield big profits.
Medecins Sans Frontieres (referred to as `Doctors without Borders'' in English) does not intend to build a new drug industry from scratch; rather, it hopes to connect researchers, institutions and drug manufacturers with common interests. The Paris-based group received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999 for mobilising doctors worldwide and providing health care to the underprivileged. The group hopes to mobilise and network the research community to work on tropical diseases in a similar fashion.
``Drug companies of India and Brazil will have a special role to play in this programme,'''' Dyann Wirth of the Harvard School of Public Health told Nature. The new initiative has received backing from the Indian�
Council of Medical Research, the World Health Organisation and prestigious research institutes in Malaysia, Brazil and France. It hopes to raise its funds from foundations and governments.
Indian researchers and companies, however, have raised doubts about what they describe as a ``well-meaning and altruistic programme''''. Sandip Basu, director of the National Institute of Immunology, thinks that short-term improvement in health care for the poor can be achieved by attacking poverty, resource constraints and the implementation failures of existing programmes. While acknowledging that long-term and non-utilitarian biomedical research yields rich dividends, he said, ``Improvements in health care over the short term need political will and administrative skill more critically than they need biomedical research.''''
Echoing similar doubts, Cipla chairperson Y.K. Hamied wants to get down to brass tacks. He wants Medecins Sans Frontieres to come up with a list of neglected diseases and check whether there are existing, effective treatments for these diseases. ``Very often, there are known treatments for tropical diseases, and there are many, different reasons why the drugs don''t get to�
the needy people,'''' said Dr Hamied, who is ready to work with Medecins Sans Frontieres in providing these medicines at affordable prices. ``But they have to be more specific and focused,'''' said Dr Hamied of the NGO''s ambitious plans.
In response, the Medecins Sans Frontieres is conducting a one-year study to chart out detailed contours of its yet young initiative. It has invested $1 million in five pilot projects for kala azar and sleeping sickness. According to Philippe Kourilsky, director-general of the Pasteur institute in Paris, these pilot projects, in addition to the study, will help ``hammer out realistically what we can and cannot do.''''