The pharmaceutical industry is vast, and often seems beset by more negative headlines than positive ones. For instance, Martin Shkreli has been dubbed the most hated man in America for buying the rights to life-saving drugs, and then jacking up the price by several thousand percent.
So a recent project to fully assess the health impact of drugs around the world should be of great interest to both the industry and the public alike.
The project, called the Global Health Impact Index, aims to rank each pharma company by the impact their products have on global health.
The impact of medicine
The Index uses a number of measures to gauge the impact of drugs in the three big diseases of malaria, HIV/Aids and tuberculosis. It’s believed to be the first effort to actually measure the impact of drugs in these areas.
“People have focused on measuring the need for different drugs…but we’re looking at the impact that they’re actually having,” the team say. “This is important for setting goals, evaluating performance — trying to have a bigger impact on global health and saving millions of lives.”
The drugs are measured according to three criteria:
- the demand for drugs in the particular area
- the effectiveness of the drug
- the number of people that can access it
Company’s are then given a score based upon the sum of their scores for individual drugs.
Winners and losers
So who are the best and worst companies? It emerged that the best, in terms of the impact of their drugs in those areas were:
- Sanofi
- Novartis
- Pfizer
The companies whose drugs had the lowest impact however, were:
- Eli Lilly
- Kyorin Pharmaceutical Co.
- Bayer Healthcare
“We are looking at the outcomes of the drugs that the companies hold, so the actual impact on death and disability,” the researchers say. “We’re looking at the amount of death and disability that the company’s drugs are alleviating.”
The eventual aim of the project is to sufficiently prod the pharma companies to focus on the needs of impoverished people around the world. It’s part of a wider initiative called Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP), which is an international professional association focused on helping poverty researchers combine and coordinate efforts.
You can learn a bit more about the Global Health Impact Index in the video below.
