Bringing attention to neglected diseases

in Blog
February 20th, 2011

Long story short, the biotech industry is only in it for the money: I was surprised to hear this, but diseases that we know that affect hundreds of millions, kill hundreds of thousands, yet know how to avoid or treat (such as malaria and tuberculosis), are not considered priority markets for industries. As are result of this, there is a surprising lack of investment in R&D for these neglected diseases.

The Center for Global Health R&D Policy Assessment is tackling this issue from a policy standpoint. Their site hosts a bank of assessments and resources to aid interested parties (governments, investors, etc) to make their decisions on investing in global health R&D. Also, there are funding opportunities, competitions, collaborative software, and policy proposals all geared toward investing in global health R&D.

They also have a great set of guest blog posts that are worth getting educated by!

by Grace Wu
picture from healthresearchpolicy.org

2 Comments on Bringing attention to neglected diseases

  • psoriasis pictures
    March 22, 2011

    Yes, it’s very unfortunate for those who suffer from a disease that is not profitable enough to receive funding, this is yet another strong argument to remove the profit factor from medicine.

  • chris
    September 17, 2011

    I agree that with much of the above, but removing the profit factor from medicine is just not going to work. Why would the very best students go to school for a decade to become doctors if they’re not going to compensated commensurately? We need to find other ways to do this…and it certainly doesn’t start with the Hippocratic Oath – otherwise, there wouldn’t be a problem in the first place.

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