Access to Essential Medicines and the Role of U.S. Universities
Friend of The Lancet Student, Stephanie Devita (but now also known as Stephanie Gutendorf since she recently got married!), from the University Coalitions for Global Health tells us what students have been doing to demand that universities do more in the fight for access to essential medicines. Make sure to check out their very useful toolkit and why not get involved? The Universities Allied for Essential Medicines also has some useful information-Rhona
Stephanie
University scientists are major contributors in the drug development pipeline. In 2000, a United States Senate report noted that 15 of the 21 drugs considered by experts to have the greatest therapeutic impact on society were developed using research funded by the United States government. Approximately 25% of all drugs classified as “[d]rugs used in the treatment of HIV infections” by the United States FDA include a university or hospital-held patent (35.7% for 2001-2006). (1) In the United States, most government-funded research occurs at universities and is paid for with tax payer’s dollars. Universities, as nonprofit institutions, have committed to engaging in research that benefits the public interest.
Research universities have an opportunity to intervene in the access-to-medicines crisis. By virtue of their upstream contribution to the drug development pipeline universities have considerable untapped influence. Both the number of patents held and the number of license agreements executed by universities more than doubled between 1991 and 2005.
Students across the U.S. have been demanding their university boards to intervene in the crisis. When a university licenses a promising new drug element to a pharmaceutical company, students hope that the university would require the pharmaceutical company to allow the drug to be made available in counties with public health emergencies at the lowest possible cost. Students are urging their boards to support humanitarian licensing policies in all of their agreements with pharmaceutical companies. This would have virtually no financial impact on the company or university, but could ultimately save millions of lives.
This work is More Important NOW Than Ever Before
We are at a crucial moment for global health. Constitutional litigation over a life-saving cancer drug has been used to threaten production of affordable medicines in India; in Thailand, Abbott Labs, a multinational pharmaceutical giant, has withdrawn registration of all new medicines as leverage in a struggle over compulsory licensing; and right here at home, Merck faces growing pressure to make its revolutionary cervical cancer vaccine available to women worldwide.
Every one of these struggles involves a university-developed medicine:
- In India, the drug at the center of the lawsuit was Gleevec, a lifesaving cancer treatment based on research by scientists at the Oregon Health & Sciences University and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.
- In Thailand, at least one of the drugs that Abbott is using as political leverage-Zemplar-is based on a patent licensed out of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
- Merck’s cervical cancer vaccine is based on patents held by Georgetown, the university of Rochester, and the University of Queensland in Australia.
To get take action for access to medicines check out http://www.essentialmedicine.org/ and http://www.ucgh.org/resources/toolkit-center/ucgh-week-of-action-2008-toolkit/
(1) These data are from a working paper by Bhaven Sampat, a professor at Columbia University.