From Africa Recovery, Vol.13#4 (December 1999), Briefs page

Drug companies join UN in combating malaria

At a time when many major pharmaceutical corporations have been reducing research on anti-malarial remedies because of the drugs' limited profitability, several have joined with the UN's World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank in a programme to reverse the trend, called the Medicines for Malaria Venture.

Each year, between 300 million and 500 million people become ill with malaria, and more than 1 million die, most of them children in Africa. Malaria's toll is greater than that of all other tropical parasitic diseases combined. The malady is becoming more difficult to combat because new strains arise that are resistant to older medicines, requiring new ones to be developed. However, since many of malaria's victims are in very poor countries, and therefore cannot afford costly medicines, commercial profit margins are low and private companies have little incentive to engage in expensive research.

Under the new programme, participating companies share the effort of developing new drugs with academic researchers. So far, Glaxo Wellcome of the UK is pairing up with Bristol University, SmithKline Beecham of the US with the University of California and Roche of Switzerland with the University of Nebraska. The project, which also is being supported by the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and the Swiss and UK governments, among others, has a $30 mn annual budget and plans to develop a new anti-malaria drug every five years.

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