PharmaManufacturing.com has an online interview with Rachel Glennerster and Michael Kremer, authors of Strong Medicine: Creating Incentives for Pharmaceutical Research on Neglected Diseases (Princeton University Press, 2004). In it, Michael Kremer says:
Overall, industry has been sympathetic to this proposal because the basic idea is to provide a market for these diseases, which is how firms are used to operating for diseases prevalent in rich countries. Firms see market incentives as preferable to reductions in intellectual property rights, or having governments micromanage the research process. In the past, a number of pharmaceutical firms have done valuable work out of a sense of corporate social responsibility, but programs such as advance purchase commitments align incentives for developing socially valuable products with private sector incentives -- providing firms with a strong business case to undertake R&D on these diseases. The next steps will be for a coalition of sponsors -- governments, private foundations, or international organizations such as the World Bank -- to put such a commitment into practice.
