“A Global Biomedical R&D Fund and Mechanism for Innovations of Public Health Importance”
The position paper, to be published in PLoS Med has been signed by Christian Brechot, President of the Institut Pasteur and other leaders of international organizations engaged in global health, including Medecins Sans Frontieres, the Wellcome Trust, DNDi with Bernard Pecoul, the Peking University and the Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health, highlights the deficit in innovation of new tools in relation to the identified needs to face up to all the global health concerns.
The authors have highlighted anti-microbial resistance, emerging infectious diseases, and neglected diseases as the most serious health challenges.
In line with WHO suggestions, the paper calls for alternative models to fund and incentivize R&D, supported by a global normative R&D framework that would deliver both innovation and access.
The events of 2014 with the devastating Ebola outbreak have shown that crisis management is more risky and costly, and less effective,than a prepared health system. This holds true for the innovation needs, and demonstratesthe need for a preparedness R&D mechanism that can quickly deliver innovativeresponses to emerging health threats.
This assay raises the fact that serious changes has to be done like stimulating innovation and ensuring access to health technologies for those who need them to avoid the past issues. This topic must be a key priority at the G7 summit in June 2015.
