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THE GIST of Editorial for UPSC Exams : 06 June 2020 (A right time to shift pharma gears (The Hindu))

A right time to shift pharma gears (The Hindu)

Mains Paper 3:Economy
Prelims level: Not much
Mains level: Research and development needed in the pharma companies

Context:

We are living in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic.
We are anxious about our families, our friends and ourselves, depressed by worldwide suffering and anxiety, upset by knowing that once more the poor and marginalised are worse affected.
Could the rules and practices organising health care around the world have been better suited to this outbreak?
Consider the Health Impact Fund as a plausibleinstitutional reform of the current regime for developing and marketing new pharmaceuticals.

Medicines:

Medicines are among .......................................................................................

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Rewards through earnings:

Commercial pharmaceutical research and development efforts are encouraged and rewarded through the earnings that innovators derive from sales of their branded products.
These earnings largely depend on the 20-year product patents they are entitled to obtain in WTO member states.
Such patents give them a temporary monopoly, enabling them to sell their new products without competition at a price far above manufacture and distribution costs, while still maintaining a substantial sales volume.
In India, the profit-maximising monopoly price of a new medicine is much lower, but similarly unaffordable for most citizens.
To be sure, before such huge markups can yield any profits, commercial pharmaceutical innovators must first cover their large research and development costs, currently ₹14 lakh crore/year.
Costs include are that of clinical trials needed to demonstrate safety and efficacy, the cost of capital tied up during the long development process, and the cost of any research efforts that fail somewhere along the way.

Concerns for Research and development:

While we should evidently continue funding pharmaceutical research and development, it is worth asking whether our current way of doing so is optimal.

There are three main concerns:

First, innovators motivated by the prospect of large markups tend to neglect diseases suffered mainly by poor people, who cannot afford expensive medicines.
The 20 WHO-listed neglected tropical diseases together afflict over one billion people but attract only 0.35% of the pharmaceutical industry’s research and development.
Merely 0.12% of this research and development spending is devoted to tuberculosis and malaria, which kill 1.7 million people each year.
Second, thanks to a large number of affluent or well-insured patients, the profit-maximising price of a new medicine tends to be quite high.
Consequently, most people around the world cannot afford advanced medicines that are still under patent.
This is especially vexing ........................................................................................

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On funding:

Long-term funding for the Health Impact Fund might come from willing governments — contributing in proportion to their gross national incomes.
Non-contributing affluent countries would forgo the benefits - the pricing constraint on registered products would not apply to them.
This gives innovators more reason to register and affluent countries reason to join.
The Health Impact Fund would get pharmaceutical firms interested in certain research and developmentprojects that are unprofitable under the current regime – especially ones expected to produce large health gains among mostly poor people.
Such projects would predominantly address communicable diseases, which continue to impose devastating disease burdens mainly upon the poor.
With the Health Impact Fund in place, there would be much deeper and broader knowledge about such diseases.
Pharmaceutical innovators would thus have been much better prepared to supply or develop suitable medicines for containing the COVID-19 outbreak.
The Health Impact Fund would make an important difference also by rewarding for health outcomes rather than sales.
For selling a medicine, it helps, of course, if this medicine is known to be effective.
But it is quite possible to sell a relatively ineffective drug or to sell a drug to patients who will not benefit from it or would benefit more from another.
With exorbitant markups, this sort of thing happens often. Firms seek to influence hospitals, insurers, doctors and patients to use their patented drug.

Different strategies:

For achieving health gains with their product, innovators need different strategies.
They need to think holistically about how their drug can work in the context of, or in synergy with, other factors relevant to treatment outcomes.
They need to think about therapies and diagnostics together, in order to identify and reach the patients who can benefit most.
They need to monitor results in real time to recognize and address possible impediments to uptake or therapeutic success.
They need to ensure that high-value patients have affordable access to the drug and are properly instructed and motivated to make optimal use of it with the drug still in prime condition.
In sum, a reward mechanism oriented towards health gains rather than high-markup sales would lead to a sustainable research-and-marketing system.
And that which is better prepared for fast and effective responses to outbreaks of unknown diseases, such as COVID-19.

Issue of state risk:

Participation of commercial pharmaceutical firms is crucial for tackling global pandemics.
They are best suited to develop and scale up provision of new vaccines and medications fast.
At present such firms do, however, face discouraging business risks from governments who may — as some have done — use compulsory licences to divest them of their monopoly rewards.
Health Impact ..........................................................................................................

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Conclusion:

Still, despite the roughness of such a modelled baseline, the Health Impact Fund would give innovators the right incentives.
It would guide them to ask not: how can we develop an effective product and then achieve high sales at high markups?
But rather: how can we develop an effective product and then deploy it so as to help reduce the overall disease burden as effectively as possible?
The COVID-19 pandemic should make us stop and think: which of these two questions should be guiding our pharmaceutical innovators?

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Prelims Questions:

Q.1)With reference to the World Bicycle Day, consider the following statements:
1. In April 2018, the United Nations General Assembly declared June 3 as International World Bicycle Day.
2. World Bicycle Day is now being associated with promoting a healthy lifestyle for those with Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes.

Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
(a) 1 only
(b) 2 only
(c) Both 1 and 2
(d) Neither 1 nor 2