Inter Press Service - October 9, 2001
Gustavo Capdevila

The MSF report, titled "Fatal Imbalance: The Crisis in Research and Development for Drugs for Neglected Diseases", states that in the last five years the world's 11 leading pharmaceutical corporations have placed just one tuberculosis medication on the market.

The combined sales of these transnational laboratories reach approximately 117 billion dollars annually.

Eight of these 11 companies "have conducted no research in the last year for fatal diseases that almost exclusively affect the poor: sleeping sickness, Chagas disease and leishmaniasis," according to the Paris-based MSF, 1999 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. The release of the report coincided with the opening in Geneva of the Global Forum for Health Research, whose goal is precisely "to correct this inequitable and inefficient gap."

The Forum, an international foundation based in this Swiss city, unites representatives of governments, universities, the pharmaceutical industry, United Nations agencies, research centres and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

The chairman of the Forum, Adetokunbo Lucas, of the Harvard School of Public Health, said Tuesday that the public and private sectors spend more than 70 billion dollars annually on health-related research and development.

But just 10 percent of that sum is spent on research on 90 percent of the world's existing health problems, which the Forum considers a misallocation of resources, known as the "10/90 gap", and proposes to correct within the next 30 years.

Mozambique's Prime Minister Pascual Mocumbi commented that it is lamentable that the elimination of the health gap will require such a long- term effort.

"We need to utilise better the 10 percent that we have, and broaden our thinking about how to allocate additional resources made available over time," he said in his speech inaugurating the meeting of the Forum.

Walter Fust, director of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, commented that the "10/90 gap" is "ignominious".

Fust said "the profits from developing new medications for a disease that affects mostly the poorest countries of the world are judged by the pharmaceutical industry to be too small to justify new investments."

In "Fatal Imbalance", the director of MSF's Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines, Bernard Pécoul, states that "millions of people in developing countries are dying every year because the only drugs available to treat many infectious diseases are old, toxic or ineffective."

Nearly 10 percent of the global disease burden involves tropical diseases, but almost no new medicines are being developed, and drug resistance is making the drugs we do have useless, says Pécoul.

The MSF report says that, of the 1,393 new medications approved between 1975 and 1999, just 13 - or one percent - were aimed at treating tropical diseases, demonstrating the "dire lack of drug R&D into unprofitable diseases."

"Drugs are not developed according to public health need, but according to profitability," said Pécoul.

MSF is currently funding three pilot drug development projects on drugs for malaria, leishmaniasis and sleeping sickness, working in partnership with experts from Brazil, Thailand, Malaysia and Burkina Faso.

The Global Forum for Health Research, which has the backing of the World Health Association (WHO), concludes its four-day sessions Friday.
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