Expanding Access to Medicines and Promoting Innovation: A Practical Approach

Expanding Access to Medicines and Promoting Innovation: A Practical Approach

On October 24, 2018, Global Access in Action (GAiA) in collaboration with the Petrie Flom Center held a conference on Drug Pricing Policies to assess the current challenges presented in drug pricing policy, from development to delivery. The conference was a follow up on the paper published in the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy, where Quentin Palfrey, Co-Director of GAiA, highlighted practical strategies which can be implemented by pharmaceutical companies and which can have a profound impact on humanitarian outcomes without undermining the profitability of their ventures. The paper, entitled Expanding Access to Medicines and Promoting Innovation: A Practical Approach, was produced in connection with the Global Access in Action project of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

“By adopting sensible approaches that have been used successfully by other companies, pharmaceutical firms can increase access to medicines, conduct critical research and development, and continue to be profitable,” Palfrey argues. “Under some circumstances, there are win-win approaches that can help the world’s poorest afford lifesaving medicines, allow philanthropic funders to have a greater impact with limited budgets, and allow pharmaceutical programs to run corporate social responsibility programs that cost less – or even make a profit – while increasing impact,” says Palfrey.

The paper argues that pharmaceutical companies should consider expanding three approaches to increasing access to lifesaving medicines for the poor and incentivizing R&D into diseases that primarily affect the global poor. First, the paper explores non-exclusive voluntary licensing partnerships between branded and generic companies as a strategy for distributing lifesaving drugs in the world’s poorest markets. Second, the paper considers various pricing strategies and argues that intra-country price discrimination – charging different prices for similar products targeted at different populations in the same market – can be an effective way of distributing lifesaving drugs to poor communities in countries that have both rich and poor populations. Finally, the paper encourages private firms to take further steps to share the fruits of their research with research collaboratives that seek to develop cures for diseases that primarily affect poor populations, and for which there is often insufficient research funding.

“Expanding Access to Medicines and Promoting Innovation: A Practical Approach”,Quentin A. Palfrey, Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy, Volume XXIV, Issue 2. Winter 2017.