"DRUG RESEARCH: WHO Panel Weighs Radical Ideas"

Read the full news story by Martin Enserink from Science magazine (1 December 2006: Vol. 314. no. 5804, p. 1373).

WHO's Intergovernmental Working Group (IGWG) on Public Health

may consider, is a hotly debated proposal for an international treaty to open up drug discovery, championed since 2002 by James Love, director of the Consumer Project on Technology in Washington, D.C. Under Love's "R&D Treaty," countries would agree to spend a minimum percentage of gross domestic product on medical research, including a portion for neglected diseases. In addition, the treaty would promote open access to research findings and possibly add R&D incentives. For instance, governments could award big monetary prizes for those who invent important new medicines. Manufacturers would then be free to produce and market them cheaply.

The treaty, recommended in a letter to the World Health Assembly by 162 scientists, health experts, and others last year, "is widely seen as the end of the pharmaceutical industry as we know it," says Anne-Laure Ropars, a researcher at the George Institute for International Health in London.

No wonder the industry is vehemently opposed. The treaty would create an "extremely complicated international bureaucracy," says Eric Noehrenberg of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations in Geneva, adding that the award system would never work. Instead, Noehrenberg offers a different idea: The world should create markets where they currently don't exist. For instance, companies could be enticed with research grants from a "Global Tropical Disease Fund" or the promise of guaranteed sales should they develop an effective new drug.

The industry also contributes through a model called the public-private partnership (PPP). Over the past 10 years, more than two dozen PPPs have sprung up to tackle diseases of the poor. Enlisting industry, academia, governments, and foundations, these partnerships, such as the TB Alliance and the Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV), have produced many new candidate drugs. And the IP protection regime has not been an obstacle, says MMV president Chris Hentschel: "If people spent less time thinking about IP and more about other things, we would make more progress."

Go to the WHO website for the public hearing on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property.