Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down: The UN fum­bles bad­ly over ac­cess to drugs while de­vel­op­ers think again about R&D strate­gies

 

End­points as­sess­es the big bio­phar­ma R&D sto­ries of the week, with a lit­tle added com­men­tary on what they mean for the in­dus­try.

  The UN has a ter­ri­ble idea for re­solv­ing the drug pric­ing is­sue

The brouha­ha over drug prices this year has now helped stir up one of the worst pro­pos­als we’ve heard of so far. This one comes from the UN, which we oc­ca­sion­al­ly for­get ex­ists at all. The prob­lem with drugs, says the UN, is that all that nasty IP used by bio­phar­ma com­pa­nies to con­trol these prod­ucts is al­low­ing them to price ther­a­pies be­yond the reach of the poor. The US and oth­er coun­tries should do what they can to de­mand ready ac­cess to the drugs tax­pay­ers help pro­vide re­search sup­port for, says the UN. We beg to dif­fer. Any so­lu­tion re­gard­ing drug pric­ing is go­ing to have to be mar­ket-based, un­less you just want to de­stroy the mar­ket. If you de­stroy the mar­ket, there aren’t go­ing to be many drug prices to fight over, be­cause we’ll have far few­er ther­a­pies. There are mar­ket-based ini­tia­tives — let’s all ap­plaud Brent Saun­ders on that score — which can go a long way to re­solv­ing this de­bate. Man­u­fac­tur­ers, we note, have al­so been go­ing a long way to de­vel­op pric­ing struc­tures for each econ­o­my. As for the UN, it might want to find an­oth­er cri­sis to ad­dress. They’re al­ready ir­rel­e­vant on the drug pric­ing de­bate.

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