The economic challenges of new drug development

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has witnessed highly successful efforts to produce effective vaccines and treatments at an unprecedented pace. This perspective discusses factors that made this possible, from long-term investments in research infrastructure to major government interventions that absorbed much of the risk from research and development. We discuss key economic obstacles in the discovery of new drugs for infectious diseases, from novel antibiotics to diseases that primarily affect the poor. The world's collective experience of the pandemic may present an opportunity to reform traditional economic models of drug discovery to better address unmet needs. A tax-funded global institution could provide incentives for drug discovery based on their global health impact. International co-operation would be needed to agree and commit to adequate funding mechanisms, and the necessary political will would require strong public support. With the current heightened appreciation of the need for global health system resilience, there may be no better opportunity than now.

Graphical abstract

Fig. 1

1. Author's estimates based on data reported in [10] (Yegros-Yegros et al.'s Additional File 2, worksheet “Diseases Included in study”); 2. Vertical bars denote 95% confidence intervals of Pearson’s product-moment correlations; 3. LMIC denotes “low and middle income countries”; HIC denotes “high income countries”; ALL denotes full sample of countries; 3. DALY denotes “disability adjusted life years” and is a measure of the burden of a disease in terms of mortality and disability. One DALY represents the loss of the equivalent of one year of full health.