What needs to happen?

• MSF believes there needs to be a shake-up of the way that health research and development is funded and prioritised, so that the R&D environment can deliver for our patients and others. 

• A new global framework to support needs-driven research must set R&D priorities so that they prioritise the greatest medical needs, and ensure that innovation does not happen at the expense of access to medicines.

• Increased public funding is urgently needed to ensure that progress in basic science and biomedicine results in new and affordable drugs, vaccines, and diagnostics for neglected diseases; to plug the R&D funding shortfalls; and to secure the use of new products by neglected populations.

• WHO needs to work with regulatory authorities to allow rapid approval and delivery of drugs to neglected patients. Support of regulatory agencies is needed to accelerate approval processes for new drugs for neglected diseases. The risks and benefits of each drug or vaccine must be assessed in relation to the needs of patients, the severity of the disease, and available treatments and vaccines.

• Technology transfer and strengthening research capacity in disease-endemic countries should be at the heart of efforts to increase R&D for neglected diseases.

What we are doing?

• Through its field programmes, MSF is well placed to witness the gaps in medical innovation today, and we use our medical experiences to highlight the ineffectiveness of using treatments that were developed 30 or 40 years ago, and raise awareness about the lack of resources being allocated to diseases that affect the poor.

• MSF conducts critical analysis of certain drug and diagnostic R&D pipelines, to encourage the research community to take into account field realities, and to assess whether the tools under development will respond to the needs of patients. Our pharmaceutical and medical teams are at the forefront of scouting out and promoting promising new developments in their field which could be of benefit to our patients.  

• MSF seeks to share and disseminate these experiences and this analysis, by bringing together academic and industry researchers from North and South to help analyse the reasons underlying the chronic crisis in R&D, set needs-driven priorities and create appropriate R&D partnerships.   The Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines has been working to convince policy makers in governments, at the European Union, and at the World Health Organization of the need for a paradigm shift in the way R&D happens today. 

• At the same time, MSF is pushing for new solutions that address the problems with medical innovation today. MSF is a founding member of the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi), a product development partnership that focuses on developing medicines –to be sold at cost- for neglected and tropical diseases.