MSF Access Campaign March 2018
MSF Access Campaign Submission Public consultation on EU funds in the area of investment, research & innovation, SMEs and single market Every day, MSF medical teams are confronted with gaps in the availability and accessibility of the health tools we need to provide lifesaving medical care. Medicines, vaccines and diagnostics are often ill adapted to our patients’ needs and the conditions and settings we work in – or priced so high that patients and healthcare systems cannot afford them. For some diseases, the tools simply do not exist at all.
I. Targeting public health needs in FP9 As the second largest funder of biomedical research, the EU has a critical role to play in ensuring that publicly funded research investments serve patients’ needs and address unmet global health challenges. To do so, the EU must make research in underserved disease areas a priority. The European Commission has already acknowledged that medical research must prioritise interventions with the “the biggest impact on public health.” 1 This aligns with the European Commission ‘High Level Group’ recommendation that EU research programmes adopt a “missionoriented, impact-focused approach to address global challenges.” 2 To achieve these ambitions, public funding must target the unmet needs of people and healthcare systems in Europe and beyond. The development of safe, effective treatments for tuberculosis (TB) and vaccines adapted for use in low-resource settings are two areas where innovation and research investment are severely lacking. Delivering new TB treatment regimens Tuberculosis killed 1.7 million people in 2016. It is now the world’s deadliest infectious disease. Drug-resistant forms of the disease are difficult or impossible to cure with existing treatments. The way we organise, finance and conduct medical research today is simply not conducive to the development and testing of new treatment regimens, which must contain multiple drugs to be effective. Under current profit-driven approaches to R&D, competing companies seek to develop and sell proprietary compounds. This hampers much-needed efficiency, coordination, collaboration and open sharing of knowledge and results, which are all prerequisites for the development of effective TB treatment regimens. The newer drugs bedaquiline and delamanid first entered the market in 2012 and 2014, respectively, each developed by different pharmaceutical corporations. Years later, we still lack the evidence we need on how to use the drugs together to provide shorter, safer, more effective treatment regimen for drug-resistant TB. Meanwhile, due to lack of industry interest, promising compounds that could improve TB treatment such as sutezolid linger in development for years, unavailable to those who wish to develop them as part of a new treatment regimen. Concerted effort and mission-oriented public investment are urgently needed to overcome these hurdles and to rapidly deliver improved combination treatment regimens for drug-resistant TB. Thermostable vaccines for low-resource settings The limited thermostability of many vaccines requires them to be kept between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius, a tremendous challenge for their deployment and major contributor to poor immunisation coverage rates in developing countries. The ‘controlled temperature chain’ (CTC) – or a ‘flexible cold chain’ – is an innovative approach to vaccine management that allows vaccines to be kept at ambient temperatures for a specific number of