Our Approaches
Promoting public health is a significant component of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and a critical prerequisite for national development. Recently, the United Nations Secretary-General’s High Level Panel on Access to Medicines recommended, inter alia, that governments adopt and implement legislative and regulatory initiatives to facilitate access to health care particularly with respect to essential medicines. GAiA offers a custom-made approach to the public-health challenges in participating countries, partnering with the Ministry of Health and other relevant government agencies in each country to support national efforts to address the misalignments that characterize public-health goals, intellectual property policies, trade and innovation. We focus on three primary strategies: (a) the optimization of legal and policy frameworks that facilitate access to medicines; (b) the regulation of pharmaceutical intermediaries, supply chains and arbitrage to optimize the distribution of drugs and facilitate differential pricing; and (c) the optimization of drug approvals and related reforms to promote domestic pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity.
GAiA’s Initiative provides unique, context-specific recommendations and technical assistance to each participating country, unlike previous efforts by international entities that have advocated the transplant of model laws and regulations to foreign countries.
Pilot Project for Regulatory Change in Sub-Saharan Africa
GAiA’s Initiative started in Sub-Saharan Africa. We provide assistance to each participating country to develop a public health-sensitive legal framework that can deliver a sustainable supply of low-cost medicines while continuing to provide pharmaceutical manufacturers with the legal protections necessary to incentivize future innovation.
GAiA’s approach is innovative for two key reasons: first, it combines legal and technical expertise with public policy analysis to provide a comprehensive, interdisciplinary review of access barriers in LMICs. Where previous efforts have focused solely on intellectual property reform, GAiA’s Initiative will work closely with in-country partners to review drug regulatory systems, competition laws, intellectual property laws, supply chain management, and anti-counterfeiting systems to identify and address context-specific barriers to access.
The goal of the Initiative is to reduce the communicable disease burden in Sub-Saharan Africa by expanding access to affordable health technologies on a sustainable, long-term basis. The projected outcomes of the project are threefold:
- The development of effective, context-specific, legal, policy and regulatory infrastructure in each participating country, combined with the development of local technical capacity to utilize this infrastructure to promote public health;
- A significant reduction in the average price of available treatments for high-priority diseases in each country, including HIV/AIDS, MDR-TB, and malaria;
- A significant reduction in mortality rates and disease burdens in each participating country, measured over the long-term.
GAiA’s position as a neutral party bridging the worlds of regulation, academia, industry, and public health makes it an ideal forum for sharing and developing innovative solutions. We seek to enhance an industry – policy maker conversation to find pragmatic solutions to healthcare challenges. We also encourage, through the support of our collaborators and partners, a cross fertilization of ideas among academic institutions and the community at large.
GAiA has published recommendations to expand access to medicines and promote innovation, hosted workshops with diverse stakeholders on strategies for increasing access to medicines, and has created actionable strategies for improving future responses to public health crises.
Learn more about our Projects.
GAiA seeks to reduce global disparities in access to medicines. In response to existing challenges, GAiA conducts research on areas pertinent to the problem of access to medicines in vulnerable population such as intellectual property law, TRIPS flexibilities, data governance and healthcare, governance of health organizations and innovative practices in the pharmaceutical industry which have successfully implemented a pricing policy to make essential medicines more affordable.
Listen to Co-Director Quentin Palfrey’s intervention on: The Role of IP Licensing and De-Siloing Research.