WHO Working Group Endorses HIF
In its report, the Expert Working Group (EWG) established by the World Health Assembly has issued a welcome endorsement of the Health Impact Fund (HIF). The EWG was established to address financing of R&D and proposals for new and innovative sources of financing to stimulate R&D related to diseases mostly prevalent in less developed countries. The EWG has now published an executive summary of its findings. The EWG has identified several mechanisms as "promising" and deserving of further examination, including specifically open source drug development, patent pools, the Health Impact Fund, a priority review voucher scheme, and orphan drug legislation. These mechanisms and others continue to have great potential for improving access to new drugs in developing countries.
Notably, UNITAID is already proceeding with its HIV/AIDS patent pool, and GSK has established a patent pool; the US government has already adopted a priority review voucher scheme, and many countries already have orphan drug legislation. It is encouraging that the HIF, as a newer proposal, has been included in this group of relatively well-developed "promising" mechanisms.
The EWG has called for further research into the application of the HIF mechanism. Incentives for Global Health has a discussion paper series, and encourages submission of new papers (or proposals for papers) on the HIF approach.
The EWG Executive Summary is available at
http://apps.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/EB126/B126_6Add1-en.pdf.
