News & Insights

The role for pharma companies in addressing global public health challenges

Key Highlights

To be clear, there have been big successes in recent years. Take HIV infection. In the 1980s, a diagnosis meant almost certain death. Today, the life expectancy of a patient with HIV/AIDS who complies with his or her treatment is close to that of a noninfected person. Nevertheless, the target set by the Sustainable Development Goals is to end the AIDS epidemic by 2030, along with the tuberculosis (TB) epidemic, malaria, and neglected tropical diseases. Unfortunately, even if the global community maintains the current pace of progress, it won’t be enough to reach these ambitious goals. Medication had brought malaria under control, for example, but now resistance is rising, especially in Asia. Treatment resistance is also rising for TB and HIV. There are more than 19.5 million people living with HIV on antiretroviral treatment; a recent study showed that more than 10 percent of patients in 6 of the 11 countries surveyed had strains of the disease that were resistant to the most widely used medicines. We need to continue innovating and developing new treatments and combinations to stay ahead of the game.

Innovative treatment is only part of the solution, though. There are many more obstacles, such as a lack of adequate medical and clinical infrastructure in some countries, of specialized healthcare providers, and of capacity to diagnose patients and get results back quickly so that treatment can be initiated. Building strong health systems requires significant investment from governments, and it’s promising to see so much momentum behind efforts to ensure universal health coverage.

Infrastructure challenges have an enormous impact on access to medicines. Often, when we have a new product that could save lives, cure people, or prevent infections in resource-limited settings—and one that we could make affordable through equity-based tiered pricing—challenges on the delivery side prevent its rapid scale-up in country. A case in point is oncology. Even if oncology drugs were given away free, infrastructure often does not exist to deliver the care. For a lot of second- or third-line treatments, you need imaging, diagnostics, labs, oncologists—which are not always readily available in low-income countries.

All this explains why collaboration is so important. No one organization can address the world’s most pressing global public health challenges on its own. All sectors—public, private, and civil society—must sit together, with open minds, and agree on how to collaborate in the best interest of patients.

Organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations can play an important role. The WHO’s new director general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has called for much stronger cross-sector partnerships. At the World Economic Forum in January 2018, several initiatives brought together leaders of multilateral organizations and large companies to discuss what collaboration could look like. If we can make that work through a focus on shared responsibility and accountability, I am confident we will see an impact on outcomes.

About Authors: Jaak Peeters (Head Global Public Health - Johnson & Johnson)

(Senior Partner - McKinsey’s Antwerp office).