Health Advocates Call on National Institutes of Health to Center Affordability and Accountability for Taxpayer-Funded Medicines
Washington D.C. — In a new piece featured in Health Affairs titled, “Integrating Equity into Licensing Agreements for Taxpayer Funded Technologies,” multiple health advocates (Public Citizen, Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative, Medecins Sans Frontieres-USA, Knowledge Ecology International, Health Global Access Project, and Yale’s Collaboration for Regulatory Rigor, Integrity, and Transparency) urge the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to ensure broad affordable access to federally-funded medical technologies by strengthening and implementing a first-of-its-kind NIH proposal on “Promoting Equity Through Access Planning.” The proposal would improve NIH practice for licensing its many inventions, which currently allows corporations to commercialize federal medical technologies with few protections for medicine affordability or public access.
Public Citizen Access to Medicines Director Peter Maybarduk said changing NIH policy to prioritize access is vital for medicine affordability.
“No one should be denied access to the medicine they need, especially when taxpayers paid for the critical research and development that makes a new medicine possible,” said Maybarduk. “NIH has the power to ensure medicines are more affordable to millions of people who need them before those medicines even reach the market. Now, NIH is exploring how to use this power for the first time. It’s critically important that NIH follow through, and greatly expand its proposal, to stop Big Pharma from profiteering on taxpayer dollars and ensure medicine gets to those who need it.”
Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi) Senior Adviser Rachel Cohen said ensuring equitable access to health tools starts with embedding access conditions into the innovation process.
“NIH is the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, and therefore has the responsibility and leverage to ensure that the inventions it helps discover and develop actually reach the patients and providers who most need access to them,” said Cohen. “A new policy to promote equitable access, if well-designed, broadly applied and integrated as early as possible in the R&D process, has the potential to dramatically increase access to urgently needed health tools and technologies globally.”
Health Global Access Project Brook Baker said NIH must go farther to hold Pharma giants accountable.
“NIH has proposed halting steps to impose access conditions with respect to commercial licensing of its internally developed medical technologies but makes insufficient commitments to ensure equitable access globally and likewise neglects to expand its access conditions to its publicly funded research and development grants,” said Baker. “Nibbling at the edges of what is otherwise corporate welfare to Pharma does little to guarantee domestic and global health returns on public R&D expenditures.”