PHP59 - Market Access Lessons From Existing Product Development Partnerships (PDPS)

Abstract

To give an overview of recent PDPs between the pharmaceutical industry, the public sector, International Health Organizations (IHOs) and academia and draw best practices from two case studies, the Medicines for Malaria Venture (adaptive PDP) and the Malaria Vaccine Initiative (innovative PDP). We surveyed the ‘Health Partnerships Database’ (HPD) to list PDPs to date. We searched for partnerships involving product development of drugs, vaccines and other pharmaceutical and diagnostics products. For the case studies, we analysed websites of the specific PDPs. The HPD lists 19 PDPs, which can be classified into two categories: adaptive PDPs, i.e. research and development (R&D) initiatives focused on tailoring existing products to developing countries’ needs, and innovative PDPs, i.e. R&D initiatives focused on developing new products to address developing countries’ diseases. Existing PDPs focus on R&D of drugs (8 PDPs), vaccines (7 PDPs) and preventive and diagnostic techniques (4 PDPs) for diseases such as tuberculosis (TB, 5 PDPs), malaria (6 PDPs), meningitis (1 PDP) and HIV/AIDS (6 PDPs). Meanwhile, recently developed PDPs are tailored as an access-to-market strategy for essential and neglected disease treatments in developing countries (4 PDPs). In-depth analysis of two PDPs showed that 1) assessment of specific health care needs in developing countries prior to partnership initiation; 2) local government engagement in partnerships; 3) sustainability of funding flow accompanied by national expertise building; and 4) monitoring, reporting and transparent sharing of results are crucial for the success of PDPs. Multinational pharmaceutical companies are increasingly dedicating part of their development pipeline to developing-country diseases and turning to IHOs as strategic partners to secure market knowledge and access in these countries. However, most collaborations still happen around the “big three” diseases, Malaria, HIV/AIDS and TB.