The great efforts to develop vaccines against the coronavirus and to find drugs that work against covid-19 are at the expense of much other necessary research. The world’s twenty largest pharmaceutical companies have plunged into covid-19. But the pipeline for developing drugs against the 15 other pathogens on the WHO’s list of potential pandemic agents is virtually empty.
This is evident from the 2021 edition of the Access to Medicine Index which has been mapping out what major pharmaceutical companies are doing to develop urgently needed medicines and make their resources available around the world for twelve years.
In 2016, the World Health Organization published a list of 16 emerging infectious diseases – mainly caused by viruses – that can cause a pandemic. From the Index It appears that only six viruses are researched into the development of medicines. Underneath is therefore also the corona virus.
Not prepared for the next pandemic
“Despite years of warnings that new coronaviruses are among the pathogens with the highest risk of causing an international health emergency, both the pharmaceutical industry and society at large were ill-prepared for the Covid-19 pandemic.”
As soon as Covid-19 hit, the industry focused on finding drugs that could be used to treat that disease. At the same time, the development of vaccines went full throttle. That has yielded a number of drugs that are beneficial for covid-19 patients, two approved vaccines and a third that is coming.
Efforts to take drugs against the other diseases on the WHO list continue to develop, write the authors of the Index, “shockingly limited”. This means that the world is not prepared for a major outbreak of diseases such as Ebola, Zika, Lassa fever, Marburg and the coronaviruses MERS and SARS, as was the case for SARS-CoV-2, as the coronavirus is officially called.
Access to medicines
Covid-19 overshadows this edition of the Access to Medicine Index, but there is a lot of attention for the actual subject: what about access to medicines and what are pharmaceuticals doing to improve it?
Of Index notices some progress but it is slow. Eight of the twenty largest pharmaceutical companies are working on a systematic approach to make new drugs more easily available in poor countries. But that approach still has to be tested in practice.
Progress has also been made with responsible advertising policies and the decoupling of sales force salaries from their sales figures. “But when it comes to specific steps to improve access to individual products, there is less evidence of progress or good behavior.”
The poorest countries forgot
For less than half of the new resources that are in the final stages of development, there is a plan to properly regulate access to them. The situation is no different for existing medicines. Pricing measures, the granting of free licenses to be allowed to make a substance or the giving away of medicines: it only occurs in a limited number of countries.
The strategies that exist to improve access to medicines mainly target huge markets such as China, India, Brazil and Mexico. The poorest countries, where a total of 700 million people live, are often overlooked.
Quite a few large pharmaceutical companies have donated drugs that play a role in the treatment of covid-19, which is an important step. But with access to vaccines things are looking less good. Rich countries have bought such large numbers of vaccines that there is not so much left for poor countries for the time being. They may not even be at the back of the queue.
Kankermedicijnen
Of Index traditionally also lists a top 20 of the largest pharmaceutical companies. These are assessed against a series of criteria grouped under three main points: company policy to make medicines more accessible, research and development and making products available once on the market.
Just like other years scores GlaxoSmithKline best, followed by Novartis, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and Sanofi. AstraZeneca, the pharmaceutical company under fire from the European Commission for appearing to be failing to adhere to contractual agreements on the supply of vaccines to the EU, is seventh.
Research and development in the field of non-communicable diseases is largely devoted to cancer research. More than two-thirds of the research projects concern new cancer drugs. In infectious diseases, in addition to covid-19, relatively much attention is devoted to HIV / AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. Together they account for more than half of all research projects.
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