Incentives important to stimulate drug development – WHO

Pharmaceutical firms need incentives, including lucrative patents, to keep creating drugs and vaccines against emergent threats such as the H1N1 influenza pandemic, the World Health Organisation’s head said on Tuesday.

“Progress in public health depends on innovation. Some of the greatest strides forward for health have followed the development and introduction of new medicines and vaccines,” said WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said.

Chan, who last month declared a full pandemic underway from the H1N1 virus, said that patents can help ensure that companies develop medicines to “stay ahead of the development of drug resistance” in diseases like malaria and tuberculosis.

“Innovation is needed to keep pace with the emergence of new diseases, including pandemic influenza caused by the new H1N1 virus,” she told a meeting on intellectual property and health, a contentious issue that has divided rich and poor nations.

“R&D can indeed be needs-driven as well as profit driven,” the former Hong Kong health director said. “International agreements that govern the global trading system can indeed be shaped in ways that favour health needs of the poor.”

Chan described the global vaccine making capacity as “finite and woefully inadequate for a world of 6.8 billion people, nearly all of whom are susceptible to infection by this entirely new and highly contagious virus.”

While acknowledging that “the lion’s share of these limited vaccines will go to wealthy countries,” she said the shortfall was “the result of limited global manufacturing capacity. It is not, in essence, a result of intellectual property issues.”