Company Analysis - Institute for OneWorld health
The challenge...
Besides the monetary problems, a lack of research and development in essential therapeutic areas also poses problems.has been laid down by numerous charitable and nonprofit groups, including in a report published in July 2002 by the VSO, Oxfam UK and Save the Children UK entitled ‘Beyond Philanthropy: The pharmaceutical industry, corporate social responsibility and the developing world’. The report was compiled from the answers to questionnaires sent out to 13 large pharmaceutical companies, and despite only 3 being noted to have answered 'helpfully', the report succinctly manages to organize its suggestions for improvement into 5 key lines of attack: pricing, patents, joint publicprivate initiatives, research and development, and the appropriate use of medicines. Suggestions include proposals for more flexibility in intellectual property rights, which having a big knock-on effect on drug pricing, could potentially assist with 2 problems at once. It states that donations, while helpful, should not be viewed as sole 'sufficient responses' to the problem, although it is true that long-term donation plans would provide non-profit organizations with a greater facility to introduce larger and more significant changes to achieve their goals.
Besides the monetary problems, a lack of research and development in essential therapeutic areas also poses problems. Many disease areas outside of HIV/AIDS receive little attention, with pharmaceutical focus being driven to more profit-making therapeutic areas such as cancer and neurological disorders. In the past, this has led to many infectious disease treatment programmes being left on the backburner by companies, making the possibility of cheaper and more potent drugs to treat these prominent conditions in poorer communities only a distant hope. Although development in the antiinfective area is lagging behind that of cancer therapeutics, with cancer drug launches having risen from just under 1400 in 2000 to over 2100 to date (Graph 1), and infection treatments rising in quantity to only just over 1200 from nearly 1000 in 2000 (Graph 2), there has been a steady increase in drug launches in this area.
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