health or wealth

The magazine New Scientist reports that a new wave of biotech firms in developing countries has sprung up to meet an urgent global need: affordable drugs and vaccines for the poor. But there's a danger that market forces will push them to just make more drugs for the rich.

Rahim Rezaie and Peter Singer of the University of Toronto, Canada, studied 78 small, innovative biotech firms in four leading economies of the developing world: India, China, Brazil and South Africa. The companies have 69 affordable drugs and vaccines on the market, and another 54 in the pipeline, for local problems such as tuberculosis and tropical diseases. These diseases have been neglected by pharmaceutical companies in Europe and North America because most of the people who get them cannot pay much for treatment, making their development economically unattractive.[SOYMB emphasis]

Drugs and vaccines are expensive to test and bring to market, so the small companies are increasingly partnering with large pharmaceutical companies to do so. As a result, Singer and Rezaie warn, they may shift to making the products to treat the diseases of the rich world that big pharma prefers. Rezaie cites a company in India working with a Danish firm on a treatment for diabetes, and another in China working with US firms on drugs for inflammatory bowel disease. Both are diseases that are major problems in the west.