Center for Global Health R&D Policy Assessment

At the annual Partnering Forum hosted by BioVentures for Global Health (BVGH) that I attended in Chicago on May 3, the session on “Making It Work: Compelling Business Models for Global Health Product Development” really caught my attention. That’s because the session panel gave some great examples of how non-profit organizations working to create new drugs, vaccines, and diagnostics for the neglected diseases of poor countries can team up with scientists and firms in the North and the South to make things happen.

In the session, Dr. Jean Pierre Paccoud from the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi), a non-profit Product Development Partnership (PDP) based in Geneva, talked about his organization’s partnership with Anacor, a venture backed biotechnology company in California, and Scynexis, a contract drug development company headquartered in France (see the embedded slide that Dr. Paccoud used in the session in Chicago). Anacor has agreed to share with DNDi its intellectual property in boron “platforms”, which are being used to design new drugs to cure African sleeping sickness, visceral leishmaniasis, and Chagas Disease. DNDi also hired Scynexis to screen the various Anacor compounds and select and engineer new drug candidates (Pace University and the Swiss Tropical Institute are also helping Scynexis by doing pre-clinical tests of the drug candidates). Once the drugs are ready for testing in humans, DNDi will activate its network of partners in Brazil, India, Kenya, and Malaysia to run the clinical trials. The slide from the session explains how these different organizations are working together in global drug development network.

The DNDi/Anacor/Scynexis partnership seems to be successful because all three parties have something important to gain from it. Anacor receives a modest payment from DNDi for the license to use its boron technology, and get favorable positive publicity for its contribution to global health. Scynexis is paid by DNDi for its drug development work. And DNDi is able to advance rapidly toward its goal of creating new drugs for major neglected diseases, without having to invest in its own scientific staff and infrastructure. This all sounds fantastic. The question is “Why aren’t there more collaborations like this? Why is the Anacor/Scynexis/DNDi tie-up the exception and not the rule? And what can be done to promote more of these kinds of partnerships?” If we knew the answers to these questions, we would be much farther along in having the new drugs, vaccines, and diagnostic devices that we badly need, and many more lives would already have been saved in low and middle income countries. But unfortunately, this kind of PDP-biotech collaboration is all too rare.

It looks like a number of factors are holding us back. In some cases, the intellectual property for the new products is fragmented across many scientists and companies – it’s very difficult to assemble it in one place so that a new drug can be developed. In other instances, small biotech companies with promising technology for neglected diseases are too busy and cash-strapped trying to get their lead products to market in the rich world, to be able to spend scarce time, talent, and capital on creating products for poor African and Asian countries where consumers can’t pay much for a new drug. In the face of these challenges, it takes exceptional leadership and vision from biotech and PDP CEOs’ to make meaningful collaboration happen.

One of the goals of our new project, “The Center for Global Health R&D Policy Assessment”, is to take a look at what can be done to encourage more of the PDPs and biotechnology companies to act like DNDi and Anacor have done, combining IP, scientific talent, cash, and links to developing world markets in advancing products for neglected diseases.

If you have questions or thoughts about this issue, please respond to this blog or email me at rhecht@resultsfordevelopment.org.