Leadership+Innovation=Life Saved

in Blog
February 21st, 2011

On Valentine’s Day kids in Kenya were showered with love. Love in the form of pneumonia vaccines that could save them from their potential premature death. This state of the art vaccine was introduced in Kenya only 18 months after having entered the European markets. Normally a vaccine would take around 15-20 years after its initial launch to enter a developing country. This change has been brought about by a new concept of Advance Market Commitment (AMC). The currently existing pneumococcal vaccine is sold at over US$70 per dose in industrialized countries. But thanks to the AMC, the long term price for developing countries will be US$ 3.50.

AMC strives to stimulate the research, the development and the manufacture of needed vaccines at an affordable price. Through an AMC strategy the donors commit a certain amount of money   to ensure the price of the vaccines once they have been developed, by doing so they ensure that there is a potential market for the vaccines. These monetary commitments give the vaccine makers a huge incentive to invest money to carry out research and develop drugs that could be used in developing countries.

This is indeed a great example of how a new innovative model and an existing technology can be merged together to make a difference. Hopefully more and more organizations will adopt AMC and increase access to new and under used vaccines and save millions of lives in the process.

-Supriya Jain