NICE chairman and GSK VP to clash at BUPA conf

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.