The Cons of Creating Incentives for New Drugs

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Infectious diseases are a major reason for the health disparity between rich and poor countries. They kill 14 million people worldwide every year, predominantly affecting members of poor populations in developing countries. In fact, these countries bear 98% of the global disease burden for infectious diseases, such as malaria, trachoma, lymphatic filariasis or schistosomiasis. These statistics should alarm you, because having drugs which cannot combat these can lead to serious problems in the future.

Having incentive to create foster new development of drugs to combat infectious disease is important and intentions good, but sometimes having too much incentive can halt growth and development of new drugs.  Companies want to make money, but by having to many incentives it can stop them from making it, halting drug production.

In the article, "Neglected infectious diseases: Are push and pull incentive mechanisms suitable for promoting drug development research?" the issue of promoting new drugs to be made is questioned.  The article states, "Large publicly funded research institutions, such as universities or the US National Institutes of Health, play a significant role in promoting basic research. They help to create non-patentable fundamental scientific knowledge, which provides a base for downstream discoveries of the profit-seeking pharmaceutical industry. This publicly available fundamental scientific knowledge generated by publicly funded research institutions reduces the research costs incurred by the pharmaceutical industry."  Having public funding is a good thing, but many times privatizing funding halts drug growth because of the incentive to make new drugs to make money for oneself cause companies to withhold information which if put together could help develop drugs faster.  By having an incentive to make money, this causes lack of research to be shared which can be detrimental to be making drugs for infectious diseases.



Future Research Questions:

Is money a good incentive to create new drugs?

By having funding for drugs, is that enough of an incentive?

Do drug companies scientists have the same intentions as those who run the company?