News Analysis: Critic Questions Plan To Market New Vaccines

- Jim Edwards

On April 7, the Center for Global Development, a non-profit think tank, will unveil an ambitious plan to prompt drug companies to market vaccines to tackle Third World diseases such as malaria, but a critic charges the plan is a giveaway to Big Pharma.

The 200-page report, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, will recommend that $3 billion be spent to buy any new vaccine that is fully developed, therefore creating a new market. Malaria has been used as an example. The report proposes to persuade Microsoft co-founder Gates, along with other groups, to offer multibillion-dollar contracts to drug developers if they can make workable vaccines.

Although Gates has made no official commitment to funding the proposal, the foundation has an executive on the CGD panel. Senior program associate Owen Barder said of the Gates Foundation last week: "It's reasonable to say they wouldn't ask the question if they weren't interested."

But before the report has even been issued, it has attracted dissent. Donald Light, a professor at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and a research fellow at Princeton University, asked in a memo to the CGD obtained by Brandweek, "whether the real agenda of this report was to pay GSK [Glaxo-SmithKline] $3 billion for its [malaria] vaccine even though it is not incurring much debt or risk?"

GSK's malaria cure is a long way from being launched, and is only 58% effective, the report states. Merck and Sanofi-Aventis are also mentioned as having vaccines in the pipeline for HIV and pneumococcus, and rotavirus, respectively.

In a later memo, Light—who is on the panel behind the report—added, "Big Pharma fingerprints are all over this report."

The proposal addresses the fact that drug companies are averse to releasing their vaccines in foreign countries because their governments often nationalize the drug, draining the companies of profits. Without a profit motive vaccine research is stalled, the CGD report claims.

"Our worst nightmare would be to discover a vaccine for AIDS. We would be forced to give it away, and it would bankrupt us," the report states, quoting an anonymous "senior industry executive."

Light believes the group's proposal is skewed. He argues that smaller pharmaceutical companies, some in foreign countries, that have vaccines that are closer to being ready for release are being ignored and could use the seed money.

Light said he would not be signing the report. "If you have an advance market commitment that doesn't give a penny until there's an actual sale

. . . who can play that game? Only someone with lots of cash . . . That cuts out most of everyone else," except for the most massive drug companies, he said.

CGD director of programs Ruth Levine emphasized that Light was only one of 25 panel members, and the rest of them have endorsed the report.

"It's a misunderstanding that this is directed at GSK or any other individual manufacturer," she said. "We've stated early on that a winner-take-all-arrangement would not produce the right incentives . . . because there are real questions about how effective the first product might be."

CGD's Barder said that even if a company were to be first to market with a vaccine, it would not get all the money because the contract pays out only as a per-vaccine match, and if a better drug came along then the buying nation could switch suppliers. GSK declined comment at press time.