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Call mounts for more R&D funding in health, development
Donors need to step up their funding to precipitate more relevant and accessible innovation in health and development, practitioners said on the second day of the 2023 Grand Challenges Annual Meeting.
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Employees in cleanroom suits test the procedures for the manufacturing of the messenger RNA (mRNA) COVID-19 vaccine on March 27, 2021, at a new manufacturing site of German company BioNTech in Marburg, central Germany. (AFP/Thomas Lohnes)
D
onor countries and organizations around the world need to step up their funding to precipitate more relevant and accessible innovation in health and development, practitioners said on the second day of a forum for global health research and development (R&D) in Senegal.
Following the devastating global impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing frantic push to engineer and market vaccines using pioneering technologies, there has been a growing emphasis on the need to fund more accessible innovations in public health, and at a faster pace.
Technologist-turned-philanthropist Bill Gates called for the world to spend at least an additional US$3 billion every year on global health R&D in order to close critical gaps in funding for neglected diseases.
“New health technologies have the potential to save millions of lives, but R&D funding is going in the wrong direction,” Gates said in his address to the 2023 Grand Challenges Annual Meeting in Dakar on Tuesday.
According to the available data, while overall health R&D funding is increasing, only about 2 percent is directed toward diseases that affect the world’s poorest people. In 2020, the annual funding gap for product development targeting poverty-related and neglected diseases was estimated at $2.6 billion.
“Donors need to step up their commitments to ensure health innovations reach those who need them more quickly, so more lives can be saved,” he asserted.
Gates cochairs the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which launched the Grand Challenges initiatives in 2003, as well as its annual global meeting to crowdsource R&D in health and development.
