Many people across the world are living longer, healthier lives than their predecessors. But – according to the World Health Organization – at least half of the global population of almost 8 billion people still do not have full access to essential health services. Every year, more than 200 million new cases of malaria are reported. In 2018, 9.6 million people died of cancer – one in every six global deaths, while 71% (around 41 million) of all deaths globally were due to non-communicable diseases.
“It is critical that innovation continues and needs to be encouraged – now more than ever,” says Komal Kalha, head of intellectual property and trade policy at IFPMA.
Creating new collaborations and partnerships, where innovation can thrive is an important part of today’s research and development landscape. Often developed through knowledge hubs and incubators, and traversing different sectors and industries, these joint ventures are a place where entrepreneurs’ ideas come to fruition, and real healthcare innovation takes place. “The aim of collaborative innovation is to partner across sectors, leverage expertise and find solutions that are long-term and sustainable,” says Kalha.
“In addition to access to capital and talent to innovate, other ways to incentivise innovation include an efficient regulatory system that is predictable, transparent and scientifically rigorous, and has respect for intellectual property,” she says.
Jaak Peeters, head of global public health at Johnson & Johnson, agrees that joint ventures are the way forward. “We can only solve diseases like HIV and TB if we embrace public-private cooperation and enter an era of extreme collaboration,” he says.
Huge progress has been made tackling HIV, he says, with some 40 new drugs, simplified treatment regimes and a near-normal life expectancy for people living with HIV – but such progress wouldn’t have been made without collaborations that supported innovation.
“With other new technologies on the horizon, we must come together now to ensure we have the right capabilities and resources in place to ensure they will reach the patients who need them as quickly as possible,” he says. “Recognising we can’t do this alone, we seek to bring together public and private resources, invest in science both inside and outside of our walls, and offer access to our R&D capabilities.”
Johnson & Johnson is one of eight drug companies working with the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), a UN agency, on its WIPO Re:Search platform. WIPO Re:Search catalyses the development of new medicines and technologies in the fight against neglected tropical diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis. Through innovative research partnerships and research and development collaborations it makes intellectual property available to researchers who need it. Its Resource Platform, managed by non-profit Bio Ventures for Global Health (BVGH) connects pharmaceutical companies with academia, and mobilises and encourages businesses to share their expertise and assets.
“This gives scientists important skills and experience, helping them develop new and improved treatments, while companies gain insights into new applications for their existing drugs and knowledge about expanding markets,” says BVGH’s chief executive Jennifer Dent.
A current partnership between MSD and the University of California, San Diego, for instance, is looking at how the company’s cholesterol-lowering statins can also be used to kill the parasitic worms that cause snail fever, a disease that afflicts more than 100 million people each year. Repurposing medicines to treat other conditions is an important part of these new collaborations and can help to bypass many of the time-consuming stages of early drug discovery.
Another partnership is tackling TB, which now kills more people each year than HIV and malaria put together. WIPO Re:Search has brokered a joint venture between Japanese drug company Takeda and the University of British Columbia, which allows researchers to mine Takeda’s historical research into protein inhibitors as part of their work on a new TB drug.
IFPMA’s own knowledge hub, Global Health Progress, is another platform championing collaborations. It details more than 200 partnerships that are using innovative approaches to confront global health challenges and transform traditional ways of working by bringing together different business sectors, from manufacturing to telecommunications and finance.
Collaboration around other technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence, big data, and machine learning is increasingly being seen as just as important to healthcare solutions as biology and chemistry.
These partnerships have already led to innovations such as wearable tech devices, which monitor biological data in real time. The use of telemedicine, too, may soon be in the ascendant. India alone has more than 420 million mobile internet users, representing a significant proportion of the population that could be reached by an integrated online healthcare system – one which may become a reality by 2022 with the government’s National Health Stack programme.
Individual pharma companies have also set up their own incubators and hubs. The Pfizer-IIT Delhi Innovation and IP programme has been co-created by Pfizer and the Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer (FITT) as a collaborative incubation accelerator, with a focus on innovation and IP.
“There are collaborations taking place across the world and in different sectors,” says Kalha. “However, gaps do exist and these need to be addressed – we talk about access to medicines but we often forget that developing sustainable healthcare solutions and getting them to patients is no easy task and it cannot be done alone,” she says.
“In order to get new and efficient products to market, you must incentivise innovation. It is not just collaborations within the pharma industry that are important – they need to be cross-sector, too. If there are other stakeholders out there, willing to work to advance innovation with industry, then let’s do it.”
