Lack of economic demand for infectious disease hurting research
Lots of times when I read press releases, snarky headlines pop into my head, particularly when something seems so painfully obvious you wonder why someone spent their time and money researching the topic. But then I stop and think about the Greek philosophers, and how evidence-based science came to topple some of the most strongly held beliefs of the age. Think Galileo's observations of falling objects, for example. Then of course, there's the whole study of probability. If you've ever spent more than a week in a probability course, you quickly discovered that intuition is often wrong. Until you develop it further and start to understand how things actually are rather than how they appear to be.
Anyway, I'm getting off-track here. It's this train of thought that has prevented me from making fun of scientific research. It's always good to have data to back up your claims because we know that common sense is often not common, or sense.
Research out of the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK indicates that despite increases in drug development for infectious diseases like Malaria, TB, Sleeping Sickness, etc., overall progress is being hampered because there's just not much economic incentive to invent new therapies. This isn't news to anyone who follows the drug industry of course, but maybe it is to some politicians somewhere. It's no secret the lifestyle drugs are often more profitable than life-saving treatments for infectious diseases because the relatively rich people in first-world countries can pay more than an African farmer bringing in $300/year.
The study suggests private-public partnerships (PPPs) to help the problem. Other companies, like Napo Pharmaceuticals, are taking a different approach to drug development banking on an inexpensive treatment with super-wide appeal to make money. Think of it as the Henry Ford way of doing business in a cash-strapped third world. Both ideas are intriguing, but I think the PPP route ultimately will have more traction. In a cash- and research-intensive field like drug discovery, adopting an unprone business models involves a bit more risk than a rich, first-world investor looking to make a buck is willing to take. It'll be up to organizations like the Gates Foundation to pick up the slack left behind by the for-profit sector.
[Image: Trypanosomes surrounded by red blood cells from Nature -- larger image here]
[tags]Medicine, pharmacy, economics, research, healthcare, infectious disease[/tags]
No Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
| TrackBack URI
You can also bookmark
this on del.icio.us or check the cosmos