Center for Global Health R&D Policy Assessment

Over the past two years, much work has been done to design and market cash prizes aimed at motivating scientists and companies to invest in and create new health technologies to fight the major diseases affecting millions of people in low income countries around the globe, including major killers like tuberculosis, malaria, and childhood pneumonia.

We have looked closely at several of these prize proposals, and have found that they are elegantly constructed and should be attractive to innovators, especially small biotechnology firms.

BIO Ventures for Global Health (BVGH) recently unveiled its proposal for a milestone-based prize for point-of-care (POC) fever diagnostics (“The Global Health Innovation Quotient Prize”) at the Partnering for Global Health Forum in Washington, DC and submitted it to the WHO Consultative Expert Working Group on R&D: Financing and Coordination.

This post first appeared December 1st, 2010 as a guest post on NextBillion.net a website and blog community of business leaders, social entrepreneurs, NGOs, policy makers and academics focusing on the connection between development and enterprise.

Results for Development guest blogger Kaitlin Christenson describes the R4D event "The Role of Prizes in Global Health R&D," a webinar and meeting held October 20th in Washington DC. The event brought together over 30 participants from North America, Europe, and Africa, including U.S. government officials, academics, NGOs, and private companies and foundations, to discuss R4D’s preliminary results from its study on prizes.

Do prizes offer enough incentive to drive global health product development?