Why Covid-19 could change how pharma and government work together

Whilst the outbreak of the latest strain of Coronavirus – Covid-19 – is a scare for healthcare systems and citizens worldwide, it presents an opportunity to pharma and government to reassess the way they work together.

With Covid-19 surpassing 400,000 cases worldwide, including over 18,000 deaths, the pressure is on the pharma industry to accelerate a vaccine through clinical trials and into patients, as quickly as possible - easier said than done.

That time is of the essence is particularly important to the pharma industry. In recent years, outbreaks of Ebola and SARS caused an influx of activity from pharma players. But when the time came for vaccines to be tested, patient cases had dwindled and companies were unable to recuperate the costs they’d put into research and development (R&D). 

At the time of writing there are 35 candidate vaccines for Covid-19 in pre-clinical development. Of these, only two could be classed as coming from major pharma players, with the bulk of activity into Covid-19 coming from biotechs, not-for-profit organisations and universities – essential institutes and companies, but those that often lack the capacity to scale-up and manufacture products on a large-scale.

Big pharma could be criticised for its failure to act on Covid-19, but arguably, the situation is indicative of a wider issue with the industry’s market-based R&D model.

The closest example pharma has to vaccine development is with its conservative approach to antibiotic development programmes – another field in which pharma players are loathe to enter due to a lack of return on investment.

With pharma companies cautiously avoiding public health crises and instead banking on profitable areas such as oncology and diabetes, there has never been a more pressing time for governments to develop public-private initiatives that encourage pharma players to invest in areas such as anti-microbial resistance (AMR) and neglected diseases.

True, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative have been put in place to solve this problem, but like with Covid-19, the majority of interest comes from smaller-scale biotechs and academic institutes.

The ongoing crisis of Covid-19 should hopefully highlight to political leaders the need for change in regard to public health crises. With the pharma industry preferring profits over risky R&D efforts, it’s up to government to develop incentive schemes that de-risk R&D efforts and encourage pharma players to enter areas such as AMR, vaccine development, and rare diseases.

Comparatively, a ‘Review on Antimicrobial Resistance’ published in 2016 argued for the need for incentive schemes in relation to AMR, - a crises which, at its worst, will likely kill far more than Covid-19.

So, if the coronavirus doesn’t scare governments into action, the looming threat of AMR should.