Drug companies in Japan invest in curing diseases of the poor
Section: Business
Page: 72
American and British drug industries’ record on healing the diseases of the poor is not so good. The Access to Medicine Foundation, a non-profit group, tracks drug firms’ efforts to serve patients in developing countries; and in its ranking of the 20 biggest ones, Japanese firms occupy four of the bottom six rungs.
The Global Health Innovative Technology (GHIT) Fund announced its first grants, to advance treatments for malaria, tuberculosis and Chagas disease. The fund, launched earlier this year, is a public-private partnership that includes five Japanese drugmakers: Astellas, Daiichi Sankyo, Eisai, Shionogi and Takeda.
Criticism of pharma companies for restricting low-income countries’ access to drugs, resulting outrage forced the drug firms to rethink their policies. Today most of the biggest ones tout themselves as allies in the fight against infectious disease.
With the GHIT Fund, the five Japanese firms are trying a slightly different model. Each will put in $1m a year for five years. Together with investments from the Gates Foundation and Japan’s government, the fund will add up to more than $100m. This will be doled out to partnerships between Japanese and foreign institutions.
An important question for the fund, as with any similar endeavour, is how much the resulting new treatments will cost. The fund will aim more or less to break even.
The GHIT Fund will be a far smaller, and less controversial, investment. But it will help the firms build links with prestigious research institutions in America and Europe, and eventually introduce Japanese drug brands to patients, and health ministries, in emerging markets. Aid now may lead to profit later.
Reporter’s own thoughts:
Even though Japan and developed countries have many issues in medical care (procedure, services, treatment, etc.), the fatal diseases remain especially in developing countries. This article is about the fund which Japanese firms put money in, and the money collected will be distributed, for instance, to researchers who contribute to healing the fatal diseases. The idea and structure of the fund themselves are not revolutionary, rather conventional, but important. I suppose that the very last sentence “Aid now may lead to profit later” indicates the essence: things that we can postpone should be postponed, things that we can not postpone should not be postponed.
Ryoya Suehara, M1 student