The problem

Diseases suffered mainly by poor people are not lucrative targets for pharmaceutical companies, which earn attractive profits from drugs that treat the diseases of the affluent. There are few or even no good treatment options for diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, schistosomiasis, leishmaniasis, dengue or Ebola, even though these diseases affect millions.

New drugs often sell at prices that most people cannot afford. This problem is vexing because actual manufacturing costs are generally quite low. Firms can nonetheless charge vastly more because their patents protect them from competition. Enabling firms to charge so much for new medicines is often justified by the need to encourage such firms to bear the high risks and costs of drug development. Still, it is hard to accept that many suffer and die from lack of access to medicines that can be mass-produced quite cheaply.

We need a better way of paying for innovation, one that provides stronger incentives to address the diseases concentrated among the poor and delinks the price of new drugs from the fixed costs of research and development.