Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #113122

Victoria Hale, PhD and Arthur Strosberg, PhD. OneWorld Health, 50 California Street, San Francisco, CA 94111, 415-421-4700, astrosberg@oneworldhealth.org

At the global level, the issues surrounding the pharmaceutical sector spotlight real and potential conflicts between free market enterprise and public health policy. The pharmaceutical industry is a powerful engine in global economic development, and shocks to that industry can send the stock market index down. Industry development strategies are naturally designed to maximize profits in lucrative (and relatively healthy) markets with minimal attention to maximizing health status around the world, and these strategies have attracted increasing sharp criticism from civil society, which sees health as a human right and public good. This panel will include presentations on four recently established and innovative organizations who are responding to these basic conflicts in the pharmaceutical sector, including:

OneWorld Health is the first non-profit pharmaceutical company in the US, incorporated as a 501(c)(3) in 2000. It was founded on a simple premise: Find research on neglected diseases that has been completed but shelved because it was not expected to be profitable by the industy. Next, persuade the companies that own the research to donate the information in return for attractive tax write-offs and public-relations benefits. Then obtain grant money and donations to bring affordable drugs to those who desperately need them. The organization challenges the assumption that pharmaceutical research and development is too expensive to create the new medicines that the developing world desperately needs. By partnering and collaborating with industry and researchers, by securing donated intellectual property, and by utilizing the scientific and manufacturing capacity of the developing world, OneWorld Health works to deliver affordable, effective and appropriate new medicines where they are needed most. Pharmaceutical companies have been making donations of research work: an enzyme inhibitor that could kill the parasite that causes; an innovative manufacturing process to make artemisinin, an ancient Chinese herbal medicine extracted from the wormwood plant, an anti-malarial compound; paromomycin, a promising new therapy to cure visceral leishmaniasis, a deadly parasitic disease. The Scientific America selected OneWorld Health as the Public Health Business Leader in 2004.

Learning Objectives:

• Describe how economic incentives and health as a public good are in conflict within the pharmaceutical sector.
• Describe, discuss and evaluate creative organizational responses to this conflict.

Keywords: Access, Organizational Change

Related Web page: www.oneworldhealth.org

Presenting author's disclosure statement:
Organization/institution whose products or services will be discussed: There may be some discussion of products being developed/tested, but they would be incidental to the presentation which is about the pharmaceutical industry generally, and organizatinal intervention.

I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commercial supporters.

Recorded presentation