No drugs in an age of plenty

Although patients with HIV/AIDS have benefited significantly frommedical and scientific innovation over the past twenty-five years, new treatments aredeveloped mainly in industrialised countries and for rich patients. The benefits of theselife-changing medical advances have yet to filter down to poorer countries. As for the rest,few new medicines exist to tackle infectious diseases that continue to kill millions yetwhich in some cases are hardly known in the west.In recent years, the focus of most research and development (R&D) funding hasbeen on HIV, tuberculosis and malaria. There has been minimal interest in diseases suchas sleeping sickness, Chagas disease and kala azar. These and other neglected diseasescontinue to plague millions of patients. Archaic, often toxic drugs such as arsenicals andantimonials are still used to treat these devastating diseases, even though the drugs’ activeprinciples were identified empirically more than a century ago.Regrettably, such diseases of poverty are ignored by the existing, profit-driven modelof drug development. Of 1556 new drugs made publicly available between 1975 and 2004,only twenty were for tropical diseases and tuberculosis

Development economics · Disease · Economic growth · Economics · Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV · Malaria · Plague (disease · Political science · Poverty · Redress · Tuberculosis · Biotechnology and Related Fields · Law · Medicine · Immunology

• Drug development for neglected diseases

  Open Access•Patrice Trouiller, Piero Olliaro et al.•The Lancet•2002

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