Orphans and Incentives: Developing Technology to Address Emerging Infections

Excerpt

This workshop of the Institute of Medicine's Forum on Emerging Infections set out to learn from experience what has been done and what is needed for the public and private sectors to collaborate effectively and productively for the health of the public. The emphasis was on cooperation in those product areas where returns from the market might be perceived as too small or too complicated by other factors to compete in industrial portfolios with other demands for investment. Quintessential examples of such products are vaccines, and in some instances therapies, for the diseases of children, for malaria, and for HIV/AIDS. Each of these offers lessons for attempts to deal systematically with emerging infectious diseases. While there are differences between the public health requirements of developing countries and industrialized countries, the growth of the middle class in the former and the vulnerability of the latter to diseases once thought to reside permanently “offshore” are doing much to narrow those differences.

The primary study case for the workshop was the Children's Vaccine Initiative (CVI), formally established in 1991 as the first comprehensive effort to yoke public- and private-sector scientific advances to a global public health priority through purposive intersectoral collaboration. The lessons learned from the CVI were integrated at the workshop with other experience from disease-focused efforts, notably malaria and HIV/AIDS. The purpose of this report was to integrate that learning and the tasks it suggests as points of reference for further action.