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World Health Assembly Creates New Initiative For R&D Financing

21/05/2010 by Kaitlin Mara for Intellectual Property Watch 6 Comments

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World Health Organization members today took an important step closer to finding new ways to finance research and development into diseases afflicting developing countries.

Innovation is critical to meeting the health needs of underserved people in developing countries, but research and development is expensive and the prices of medicine is as a result often high. Today the annual World Health Assembly decided on a new initiative aimed at addressing the need for creative financing mechanisms to meet the needs for effective drugs at a low cost.

A new consultative expert working group on research and development financing and coordination was created to take up the work of a previous expert working group. The previous group was dogged by concerns about lack of transparency, and its final report did not meet the expectations of many member states. It is hoped that the new group will provide concrete, actionable solutions for financing much-needed new treatments for diseases affecting the poor, and that member states will have more participation in its process than they did with the last.

Member states will nominate the experts, consult with regional groups to ensure balanced representation, and then submit names to the Executive Board meeting, which advises the WHO’s decision-making World Health Assembly, in January 2011. The WHA met this week from 17-21 May. The final report of the new group is scheduled to be submitted to the WHA in May 2012 through the January 2012 Executive Board.

This is a “good indication for countries of the developing world,” as they are the ones who suffer the consequences of not having medicines, or of having weaker control systems, David Chiriboga, Ecuador’s minister of public health, told Intellectual Property Watch. Ecuador is currently speaking on behalf of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), which was a leading voice in this week’s negotiations, and which had provided initial resolutions on two critical issues: the working group, and falsified medicines (IPW, Public Health, 18 May 2010).

This decision represents an “important political statement: ‘wait a minute, you need to listen to us’,” Chiriboga added. “In short, [this is] a victory for the developing world in general,” he said to the negotiating committee.

This was a victory at the end, agreed Maria Luisa Escorel of the Brazilian delegation, highlighting new transparency on the first group’s methods and sources, the ability of member states to participate in the process as key aspects of the agreement. She praised the strong participation of UNASUR, which she said was the beginning of something that will continue.

Stephen Muleshe of the Kenyan Ministry of Medical Services said it was “an agenda for the third world,” to help “us to get medicines to our people.” He added the hope that the new group would come up with good recommendations, implementable by member states. This would be much more helpful than a menu of options, he said.

“We were happy with the original” report, said a delegate from a developed country, adding that it had had a menu of a lot of ideas and left it up to member states to take forward the recommendations, or to take forward recommendations not in the report. But ultimately the developed countries “could support” a new group taking forward various propositions from the first group, or looking at new ones, the delegate said.

That experts will be approved by the Executive Board is unprecedented for expert groups, the delegate added, but said that as this particular group is unique it was okay.

As a part of the new process, full information about the methodology, advisors and sources of the previous group will be publicised online by the end of June. Transparent management of the new group is a critical part of its terms of reference, which also place government in charge of nominating experts.

And the new group will look not only to deepen the work done by the first but will also explore proposals that were not looked at by the first group. Issues needing further exploration include the de-linking of the costs of research and development and the price of health products, which was a critical matter for developing countries.

The full text of the final resolution is available here [pdf].

During the resolution’s adoption the line “observe the scientific integrity and be free from conflicts of interest in its work (or undertaking)” was added to the working group’s terms of reference at the suggestion of Thailand, and footnotes on regional economic integration organisations were changed to reflect standard WHO language.

What really aided the movement of negotiations, said Chiriboga, was a lot of support from all developing countries in spite of sometimes differing perspectives.

What comes next is also critically important, said Muleshe. The group will need to come up with recommendations that states will be expected to implement. The global strategy and plan of action on public health, innovation and intellectual property was an expensive venture and it is up to all governments to put research and development as a top priority, he said. A critical next phase is understanding the current research capacity of developing countries, he added.

Also, this is only one part of the global strategy, said Escorel. It will be essential to make sure its other parts, especially those on access to medicines, will be addressed in the future work of the WHO.

“The issue of intellectual property is critical for 4.8 billion people who live in developing countries… poverty affects their access to health products to fight disease,” said the WHO in a press release on the close of the WHA, adding the global strategy “was designed to promote new thinking in innovation and access to medicines, which would encourage needs-driven research rather than purely market-driven research.”

WHO Director General Margaret Chan hailed the spirit of collaboration and consensus building in a closing speech, referring to R&D financing and “substandard, spurious, falsely-labelled, counterfeit medical products,” where agreement was also reached this week (IPW, WHO, 21 May 2010).

“Thank you for finding a way forward” on these issues, she said.

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Related

Kaitlin Mara may be reached at kmara@ip-watch.ch.

Creative Commons License"World Health Assembly Creates New Initiative For R&D Financing" by Intellectual Property Watch is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Filed Under: IP Policies, News, Themes, Venues, English, Health & IP, Innovation/ R&D, Patents/Designs/Trade Secrets, Technical Cooperation/ Technology Transfer, WHO

Comments

  1. Miles Teg says

    22/05/2010 at 12:48 pm

    WHO caught with its pants down when Wikileaks revealed that BigOligopPharma had the document before member states… Now this… seems like there is a shadow government on intellectual property at the WHO… This is a victory for developing countries after the attempt at perversion of this process… one would have thought the WHO would have taken the need for innovation more seriously than this with new chemical entities being discovered at a fraction (about a 10th) of what they were in the 70s… no matter as long as the number of ‘new’ patents goes up (even if they are ‘old’)… like they say in health, what gets measured gets done…
    One really needs a God Complex to pull this off…

    Reply
  2. James Loria says

    20/06/2010 at 1:00 am

    These processes run so deep and have such a tremendous impact on all countries. The first and foremost question needing to be addressed before anything of real significant value can be achieved is:
    “Will all of the countries in the world come together and truly commit to working for the benefit of the WHO without prejudice, selfishness, jealousy or personal goals in order to change the future for all of mankind”?
    The world will need to change drastically and everyone will need to rise to a higher level of consciousness before that can ever be achieved. Until then, the same types of problems will continue to exist and plague our planet, with the WHO being blessed with the slow process of moving forward with its agenda.

    Reply
  3. Miles Teg says

    20/06/2010 at 8:50 pm

    @ Loria, nice idealist sentiment much needed at WHO. Contrary to aspirations, WHO staffers were actively campaigning against a Brazilian proposal in the text that said to the effect that “Health needs should take priority commercial interests”… makes you wonder about WHO Human Resources, WHO management, what it takes to get ahead at WHO, and more importantly WHOs shying away from its role as balancing short term interests with medium to long term needs… WHO will issue a statement to protect trade in pork products during Swine Flu ‘pandemic’ but almost attacked (then retracted) Thailand for supporting compulsory licenses for patients who could not afford it… It take REAL IDIOT SAVANTS to forget that the system needs strong contradiction to survive… that said, barring a few developing countries, most are just bystanders while the rich countries protect their own systems while decimating those of the South including through promoting aid dependency… idealism ought to be tempered with the fact that we find ourselves in circumstances not of our making… the hope lies now in the austerity programs in the US and EU that is going to decimate the health systems and care… perhaps after that it will be clear that policies for the natives are not good for the North either no matter how professorial the advice may be…

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. World Health Assembly Creates New Initiative For R&D Financing – Lega Digital Consulting Group says:
    24/05/2010 at 7:09 am

    […] Link to the article: http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/?p=11003 […]

    Reply
  2. WHO Future In Question, Debate Over Industry Representation | Intellectual Property Watch says:
    17/01/2011 at 11:08 pm

    […] During the last WHA in May 2010, a consultative expert working group on research and development financing and coordination was created. A previous group was shaded by concerns about lack of transparency and its final report did not meet the expectations of a number of member states (IPW, WHO, 21 May 2010). […]

    Reply
  3. WHO Group On Neglected Diseases R&D Issues Workplan With Timeline | Intellectual Property Watch says:
    23/05/2011 at 7:57 pm

    […] The mandate for the R&D working group was set at the 2010 Health Assembly (IPW, WHO, 21 May 2010). […]

    Reply

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