Essential Medicines News

Sanofi-Aventis and Novartis have experienced about half the expected demand for their drugs artesunate and coartem which they have produced specifically for treatment of malaria in the developing world. This weak demand, which is inconsistent with the actual felt need for the drugs, leaves many large pharmaceutical companies wary of becoming involved in similar opportunities.

Therefore, the Center for Global Development has convened a panel of experts to find out why demand for these drugs from the developing world isn’t higher. With better methods for forecasting demand, many are hoping that the industry will pay greater attention to global public health needs. In 2002, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization held a study to describe the conundrum that the developing world faces.

Poor countries have to know the price of a vaccine to see if they can afford it. Manufacturers, however, are hesitant to set a price unless they know how many doses will be bought. And aid donors cannot be sure they can subsidize a purchase without knowing the price and quantity of the sale.

Models from PneumoADIP at Johns Hopkins University predict weak demand, only about 10 million treatments for an AIDS vaccine developed with minimal effectiveness. Steve Brooke, the commercialization adviser for the human papilloma virus vaccines at PATH, describes the utility of long-term forecasting:

…as long as everybody understands–when you’re early in the product cycle, your accuracy of [predicting demand for] any particular country, for any particular time, for any particular unit volume, is going to be terrible… it would be disappointing to me if these kinds of forecasts got used to make critical decisions for vaccine X versus vaccine Y.