Javier Guzman

Neglected Disease Research and Development: How Much Are We Really Spending?

Mary Moran and colleagues survey global investment into research and development of new pharmaceutical products to prevent, manage, or cure diseases of the developing world.

Mapping of available health research and development data: what's there, what's missing, and what role is there for a global observatory?

The need to align investments in health research and development (R&D) with public health demands is one of the most pressing global public health challenges. We aim to provide a comprehensive description of available data sources, propose a set of indicators for monitoring the global landscape of health R&D, and present a sample of country indicators on research inputs (investments), processes (clinical trials), and outputs (publications), based on data from international databases. Total global investments in health R&D (both public and private sector) in 2009 reached US

Registering New Drugs for Low-Income Countries: The African Challenge

240 billion. Of the US

Mapping global health research investments, time for new thinking - A Babel Fish for research data

214 billion invested in high-income countries, 60% of health R&D investments came from the business sector, 30% from the public sector, and about 10% from other sources (including private non-profit organisations). Only about 1% of all health R&D investments were allocated to neglected diseases in 2010. Diseases of relevance to high-income countries were investigated in clinical trials seven-to-eight-times more often than were diseases whose burden lies mainly in low-income and middle-income countries. This report confirms that substantial gaps in the global landscape of health R&D remain, especially for and in low-income and middle-income countries. Too few investments are targeted towards the health needs of these countries. Better data are needed to improve priority setting and coordination for health R&D, ultimately to ensure that resources are allocated to diseases and regions where they are needed the most. The establishment of a global observatory on health R&D, which is being discussed at WHO, could address the absence of a comprehensive and sustainable mechanism for regular global monitoring of health R&D.

The malaria product pipeline: planning for the future

Mary Moran and colleagues discuss the best strategies for African regulators to be supported in their efforts to evaluate and approve drugs for their own populations.

Neglected disease research and development: Is innovation under threat?

Today we have an incomplete picture of how much the world is spending on health and disease-related research and development (R&D). As such it is difficult to align, or even begin to coordinate, health R&D investments with international public health priorities.Current efforts to track and map global health research investments are complex, resource-intensive, and caveat-laden. An ideal situation would be for all research funding to be classified using a set of common standards and definitions. However, the adoption of such a standard by everyone is not a realistic, pragmatic or even necessary goal.It is time for new thinking informed by the innovations in automated online translation - e.g. Yahoos Babel Fish. We propose a feasibility study to develop a system that can translate and map the diverse research classification systems into a common standard, allowing the targeting of scarce research investments to where they are needed most.