The chairman of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) and the vice president of UK pharmaceuticals at GlaxoSmithKline are to go head-to-head at this year's Bupa Health Debate, on March 25 at London's Hospital Club. They will be joined by the HIV policy adviser at Oxfam and a leading academic from Yale University, to discuss the increasingly contentious issue of drug pricing.
New medicines are protected under patent for a limited period to allow drug companies to recoup their huge investment in research and development. The consequence is inflated prices which put medicines out of reach of those most in need.
The high cost of new drugs is a global problem. In the developed world, governments are increasingly left to make "life or death" decisions over which drugs to fund as they only have limited budgets available for healthcare. Arguably, the issue is even more stark in developing nations because the patent system encourages pharmaceutical companies to focus on drugs that generate the greatest profits. R&D is therefore skewed towards problems of the affluent, such as obesity, while diseases affecting the poor are overlooked, says BUPA. There have been no new tuberculosis drugs introduced in over 30 years for example, but the TB Alliance says that every year more than two million people die from TB and eight million new cases develop.
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