Why We Need Open Source Pharma
BY POLLY J. PRICE

I support open source pharma and the Bellagio Center conference because we must find a better way to combat the rising, world-wide threat from drug-resistant tuberculosis. Treatment even for “ordinary” TB is expensive, but any form of drug resistance requires very costly alternatives.

• In the US, the cost of treatment for just one drug-resistant patient can exhaust the entire budget of a local public health agency. As I wrote recently in The New York Times, the estimated cost of treatment over the next ten years in the US is $1.3 billion—and that is only if infection rates remain the same, and the cost of drugs used to treat this evolving form of TB do not rise.
• The World Health Organization reports that “Anti-tuberculosis (TB) drug resistance is a major public health problem that threatens progress made in TB care and control worldwide.” WHO also notes that “drug resistance arises in areas with weak TB control programmes,” suggesting many countries cannot pay for even the standard TB treatment regimen.
• There is a vaccine for TB used in some countries, but the CDC reports that t is used only to prevent severe forms of TB in children. In the United States, however, the vaccine “is not generally recommended in the United States because it has limited effectiveness for preventing TB overall.”

Treatment of drug-resistant tuberculosis, only one of several public health threats already at epidemic levels in a few countries, requires a global solution. It's essential that we find a better way to pay for treatment and make basic TB drugs available to more developing nations.

Polly J. Price is a professor at Emory University School of Law in Atlanta. 

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Other essays in this series:

​James Kassaga Arinaitwe, Global Health Corps & Aspen Institute Fellow / Kampala
Manica Balasegaram, Exec. Director, Access Campaign, Médecins Sans Frontières / Geneva
John Wilbanks, Chief Commons Officer, Sage Bionetworks / Washington, D.C.
Dimitrios Tzalis, Founder & CEO, Taros Chemicals GmbH & Co. KG. / Dortmund
T.V. Mohandas Pai, Chairman, Manipal Global Education Services / Bangalore
Els Torreele, Director, Access to Essential Medicines Initiative, Open Society Foundations / NYC
Tomasz Sablinski, CEO of Transparency Life Sciences / NYC
Zakir Thomas, Open innovation expert & former Project Director of OSDD / Delhi
Matthew Todd, Founder of Open Source Malaria / Sydney & Cambridge