University of Edinburgh pushes to Provide Access to Medicines for the Developing World
Today we’ve published a fascinating article on child malnutrition in the developing world, Vishal Raman’s ‘Hope for a Hungry Child’. Read it here. Meanwhile, in today’s blog Goldis Chami and Kevin Hooi of the University of British Columbia Chapter of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines report on the decision by Edinburgh University to push pharmacutical companies to produce inexpensive drugs for developing countries.
The University of Edinburgh’s solution to the problem will be to refuse to license its medical technologies to pharmaceutical companies unless they agree to sell them at cost in developing countries
Last week, the University of Edinburgh made an exciting announcement relevant to the provision of health care to millions of people around the world. The university plans to push pharmaceutical companies – to whom the university licenses its medical technologies – to provide inexpensive medicines for people in developing countries. The decision was made after considerable advocacy by the Edinburgh chapter of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, a unanimous decision made in favour of the policy at the Annual General Meeting of the Edinburgh University Students’ Association, as well as a WHO campaign supported by the Clinton HIV/Aids Initiative (CHAI) and the US Department for International Development.
One of the major barriers to providing proper healthcare to people in developing countries is the lack of affordable medicines. We recognize that pharmaceutical companies spend a great deal of time and money developing medicines and performing clinical trials to ensure the safety and efficacy of those drugs; however, the market prices set to recoup development costs and generate profits are well outside the reach of many patients who need them the most. Research universities also play a huge and often unrecognized role in the development process, doing much of the initial basic research that goes into discovering lifesaving medical technologies. After patenting their findings, universities license their findings out to pharmaceutical companies, who pick up where they leave off and commercialize their results.
The issue is not that pharmaceutical companies should not be able to set high enough prices to profit from their products. The problem is that even though they rake in significantly large profits – in 2007, Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company median profits were 16%, compared to median profits of 6.1% for all other Fortune 500 industries – most drugs still remain unaffordable and consequently out of reach for millions of people in low- and middle-income countries. Although the world’s most profitable industry, it has become so with an incredible human cost: through rising morbidity and mortality in the developing world. It is estimated that approximately one third of the world’s population lacks access to essential medicines, and in the poorest parts of Africa and Asia this figure rises to over 50%.
The University of Edinburgh’s solution to the problem will be to refuse to license its medical technologies to pharmaceutical companies unless they agree to sell them at cost in developing countries. Edinburgh is the first university in the UK to enact global access licensing policies—policies that promote socially-responsible transfers of university technologies. Other universities, notably the University of California-Berkeley, Emory University, and the University of British Columbia, have enacted similar policies. We sincerely hope that other research universities across the globe will understand the significance and value of these policies, and follow in their footsteps.