Chapter 5: $3 billion per disease

Chapter at a glance

Our aim is to set a market size large enough to attract serious commercial investment from several pharmaceutical companies that see technological opportunites, while ensuring that the cost of the vaccines purchased is less than the social value and better value for money than alternative uses for the funds.
A market of $3.1 billion is comparable to the value of lifetime sales of an average pharmaceutical product. Given that expected sales for existing products were sufficient to attract commercial investment from pharmaceutical firms, we recommend commitments worth about $3 billion per disease for early stage products such as malaria.
Our recommendation is not based on any estimated cost of vaccine R&D. It is based on the realized sales revenues of existing commercial products.
As an example, taking account of (modest) expected revenues from other markets, a price of $15 per malaria treatment, for 200 million treatments, would provide this revenue and would be exceptionally good value for money in terms of health cost-effectiveness.
Larger commitments would likely further accelerate development of vaccines; even with higher costs, vaccines would still be a bargain in development spending.