204 research outputs found
Combating Antibiotic Resistance Through the Health Impact Fund
No full textThe Health Impact Fund (Hollis & Pogge 2008) is an innovative financing mechanism for global drug discovery and dissemination, separating the reward for successful R&D from the market price of the drug, also known as de-linkage. Aaron Kesselheim and Kevin Outterson have recently proposed a mechanism to reimburse companies for antibiotics according to their social value, but conditioned on achieving conservation goals to limit resistance (Kesselheim & Outterson 2010, 2011). This paper will explore whether this antibiotic resistance conservation proposal can be adapted to the framework of the Health Impact Fund. If these proposals can be meshed, then antibiotics might be an interesting therapeutic class for a test of the Health Impact Fund
Delinking Investment in Antibiotic Research and Development from Sales Revenues: The Challenges of Transforming a Promising Idea into Reality.
No full textKevin Outterson and colleagues outline a model to address access, conservation, and innovation of antibiotics
Fair Followers: Expanding Access to Generic Pharmaceuticals for Low- and Medium-Income Populations
No full textU.S. trade offi cials frequently employ the rhetoric of free riding and piracy when discussing intellectual property (IP) rights for medicines (Drahos with Braithwaite 2002; Benson 2005). The gentler term free rider is applied when developed country governments (OECD) use monopsony power to negotiate price discounts on patented pharmaceuticals (Outterson 2004, 2005b; U.S. Department of Commerce 2004; PhRMA 2005). Poorer governments usually lack suffi cient market power as a purchaser to negotiate discounts for their low- and middle-income populations. In these cases, governments and patients may resort to unlicensed generic drugs and compulsory licensing. In response, U.S. trade offi cials and IP owners infl ame the rhetoric and label such activity piracy
Towards a new global business model for antibiotics: delinking revenues from sales.
No full textReport from the Chatham House working group on new antibiotic business models
Higher First Amendment Hurdles for Public Health Regulation
No full textIn 2007, Vermont enacted the Prescription Confidentiality Law, prohibiting pharmacies from selling “prescriber-identifiable” prescription information to data-mining companies such as IMS Health and Verispan. These companies aggregate such data and sell them to many groups, including drug companies, so when drug sales representatives visit a physician, they can know exactly what prescriptions the physician has written
Analyzing Antimicrobial Resistance as a Series of Collective Action Problems
No full textAntimicrobial resistance (AMR) causes over 1.27 million deaths annually, making it one of today’s most urgent health threats. Given its urgency, there are often calls for large-scale global initiatives to address AMR. However, collective action theory has yet to be applied to the problem in a systematic and holistic manner. Fuller engagement with collective action theory is necessary to avoid three risks, namely: mischaracterizing the kinds of challenges that AMR presents; over-simplifying the problem by reducing it to a single type of collective action problem; and overstating the ability of collective action theory to formulate effective solutions. This article relies on the work of Elinor Ostrom to develop an analytical framework for collective action problems concerning public goods (non-excludable and non-rivalrous) and common goods (non-excludable and rivalrous). When analyzed through this framework, we find that AMR poses nine distinct collective action problems. This more granular framing of AMR provides, in our view, a better basis to develop policy solutions to address the multifaceted
challenge of AMR. We conclude with proposals for future research
Pharmaceutical Arbitrage: Balancing Access and Innovation in International Prescription Drug Markets
No full textThe price of prescription drugs lies at the heart of two major public health issues: distributing antiretroviral medicines for use against the global AIDS epidemic and purchasing medications from Canada by U.S. consumers using the Internet. Both situations highlight the need to reduce financial barriers to access to medications, while maintaining incentives to promote pharmaceutical innovation
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