Biotech: Not just for the rich
BEHIND THE vibrancy of the life sciences industry so visible at the 2007 BIO convention this week in Boston is a sobering statistic from the World Health Organization: Each year, 10 million people in poor nations die because they lack access to existing medicines or vaccines. In his keynote address yesterday, Michael J. Fox, the actor and founder of a Parkinson's disease research foundation, said that of the 30,000 known human diseases, there are treatments for just 10,000. Many of the diseases without treatments afflict residents of resource-poor countries, which draw little interest from drug makers.
This is a challenge for biotech that goes beyond finding life-extending medications for cancer victims or a drug to encourage the good cholesterol, as important as such advances would be. In much of the world, preventable or treatable illnesses like tuberculosis and cervical cancer are still major killers. In his videotaped remarks to BIO yesterday, Senator Edward Kennedy called for one approach to this imbalance in the world's access to the fruits of biotechnology. His reform legislation for the Food and Drug Administration includes a plan for accelerated FDA review of drug candidates for tropical diseases.
Last year, Senator Patrick Leahy sponsored a bill to ensure that medical technologies developed at federally funded labs would be available not just to branded drug makers but also to low-cost generic drug makers serving developing countries. This is also the goal of a student group called Universities Allied For Essential Medicines. It wants research universities that hold rights to new medical discoveries to license them to branded drug makers with the condition that they be usable by generic makers in developing countries.
When generic makers are granted these rights, neither the universities nor the pharmaceutical companies lose substantial revenues, since the patented, branded versions of the drugs are usually unaffordable in low-income countries. At a UAEM meeting at Harvard last month, Dr. Jim Kim, the former AIDS director for WHO and now chairman of the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, urged students to pressure universities to insist on making their technology accessible to the poor.
The benefits of medical advances from earlier generations could also save lives with more support from the West and from the developing countries themselves. In a report released this week, Save the Children says that 400,000 children die each year of measles, which can be prevented by a 15-cent vaccine. "We must lead in compassion as we have led in innovation," Kennedy told the BIO audience. Researchers, drug company executives, and elected officials should seek all possible ways to make the miracles of medicine the birthright of all, not just the rich. 
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