Youth Stop AIDS vs MARTIN SHKRELI
Youth Stop AIDS challenging the system and raising awareness about the UN High Level Panel on Access to Medicines
AIDS activists go bare to target austerity
AIDS activists go bare to target austerity
The Young People Fighting AIDS and BIG PHARMA
The Young People Fighting AIDS and BIG PHARMA
High-Level UN Initiative On Global Public Health Gap Holds Landmark Hearing
High-Level UN Initiative On Global Public Health Gap Holds Landmark Hearing
GSK expand access to medicines but much more needs to be done
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) recently announced in a press release that it would be expanding its graduated approach to patents and intellectual property to widen access to medicines in the world’s poorest countries. GSK have said that they won’t file patents in Least...
Mbolonzi’s story: Access to insulin in Kenya
Mbolonzi from Kenya (living with type 1 diabetes) My name is Mbolonzi. I live in Kenya and I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in July 2013 when I was 29 years old. I lost a lot of weight, my skin had become so dry, and I drank much water - maybe up to 5 litres in...
Gwebani’s story: drug-resistant TB in South Africa
23 year old Nikiwe Gwebani is a Multidrug-resistant (MDR) TB patient living in Khayelitsha one of the biggest townships in Cape Town, South Africa. She was Diagnosed with MDR TB on the 14th of December 2015 after showing some signs of TB in October which included...
MYTH 1
MYTH 1: It costs $1 billion to produce a drug because of the cost of clinical trials, and accounting for all the R&D of other medical experiments that didn’t prove successful. BUSTED! Even the big pharma boss of GSK has admitted this is “the industry’s biggest...
MYTH 2
MYTH 2: We charge high prices so we have money to reinvest into new drugs. BUSTED! The majority of financial return on medicines isn’t even spent on R&D. Big pharma (obviously) aren’t keen on being transparent about this issue but as you can see from the table...
MYTH 3
MYTH 3: Private investment funds medical R&D so we need to charge high prices to be accountable to these investors. BUSTED! Who pays for drug R&D? We do. A study from the Global Forum for Health Research showed that 43% of investment is fronted by public...
MYTH 4
MYTH 4: Without patents there would be no medical innovation Busted! Firstly, if this was true then we wouldn’t need this campaign! - if patents really did incentivise innovation then we would have been ready for the ebola crisis and we’d already have an effective...
Me Too Drugs
Fojo T et al. “Unintended consequences of expensive cancer therapeutics – the pursuit of marginal indications and a me-too mentality that stifles innovation and creativity” JAMA Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery (2014). Prescrire (2014); 34 (364):132-136 ‘New drugs...
Gilead admit that high prices aren’t to cover R&D
ACCESS DENIED: Report of the Inquiry of the All Party Parliamentary Group on HIV and AIDS into access to medicines in the developing world December 2014 http://impactaids.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/ACCESS-DENIED-APPG-Report-1.12.14.pdf p.39
The CEWG report
Report of the Consultative Expert Working Group on Research and Development: Financing and Coordination (2012) “Research and Development to meet Health Needs in Developing Countries: Strengthening Global Financing and Coordination”...
One in four HIV/AIDS treatments would not exists without university research
Sampat, B. N. (2009). Academic patents and access to medicines in developing countries. American journal of public health, 99(1), 9-17.
Between 1/4 and 1/3 of new drugs originate in a university lab
Kneller, R. (2010). The importance of new companies for drug discovery: origins of a decade of new drugs. Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, 9(11), 867-882.