Last evening the Global Health Council (GHC) and the Global Health Forum (GHF) co-hosted an event on funding R&D for neglected diseases. The event was one of several hosted by the GHC at the posh Intercontinental Hotel.
A “proposal” for PDP funding was presented by Novartis, IAVI and Mary Moran. Called PDP+, it was an attempt to “merge” three different proposals that were endorsed by the WHO Expert Working Group (EWG).
Last year, Mary Moran wrote the part of the EWG Report dealing with PDP funding, and endorsed three projects — a 1.5 page proposal from the IFPMA, an unpublished IAVI/PATH proposal never submitted to the EWG, and a proposal written by Mary Moran years earlier, and never submitted formally to the EWG. Malini Aisola discusses them here.
At the meeting at the Intercontinental, Holly Wong from IAVI, Paul Herrling, the Head of Corporate Research at Novartis, and Mary Moran of the George Institute tried to present a unified front — but there were few details of how the proposal would work. The three could not explain how priorities would be set, how PDP+ would be funded or governed, how conflicts of interest would be managed, or how access to products would be addressed. There had been no consultation with stakeholders outside of pharma or a few PDPs. At various times, the proposal seemed to include almost all other proposals that anyone had made, since it “could” end up including patent pools, prizes, or any number of things.
One concrete policy endorsed by Herrling was that the PDP+ project would demand an exclusive license to products in a field of use, in return for funding projects. It was not clear if Wong or Moran were endorsing this.
When the audience was given a chance to talk, TDR and just about everyone else who spoke from the floor was critical of the centralizing decision making in the proposal. Moran responded by saying that they had not decided if PDP would be “making decisions” or “just fund” projects, as if funding projects doesn’t require any decision making. (Actually, it did not in her own proposals that she endorsed as part of the EWG).
Michelle Childs noted the PDP+ proposal was about spending money, and did not address where the money would come from. Moran said the PDP+ would lower the risks for donors, would lead to greater donor contributions — as if there was nothing donors would love more than to turn the management of their money over to the new PDP+ institution.
Hannah Kettler of the Gates Foundation suggested that the three had perhaps “collapsed too many things….into one thing.”
I asked what the evidence was, from the pharmaceutical industry or the software industry, that centralized decision making and large scale led to more innovation. I also asked the views of the panel members on the open source dividend proposal included in several of the EWG rejected proposals, that were designed to expand access to knowledge. None of the members of the panel, including respondents, seemed familiar with open source dividend proposals made to EWG.
A journalist asked about the Le Monde article about the pharmaceutical industry influence on the EWG report. One panel member said people should “not throw the baby out with the bath water.”
Not discussed was the relationship between the PDP+ and the proposal by several countries — but rejected by the EWG, to discuss elements of a possible biomedical R&D treaty. Among the proposed elements for a biomedical R&D treaty would be standards and mechanisms for greater transparency of R&D efforts — one possible benefit from the PDP+ proposal – but without necessarily the centralized decision making for managing funding portfolios proposed by Wong, Herrling and Moran.
Also not discussed was the apparent dual role of Moran as a high profile member of the WHO EWG, that evaluated proposals, and as an increasingly a high level figure in the highest rated proposal to manage the money.
According to WHO, the issue of the Expert Working Group on R&D should come up today at 9am.