Dr. Christoph Loeser and wife Elisabeth visit the Access EXPO this week at Vanderbilt. Housed in a 48-foot trailer near Eskind Library, the exhibit is part of the Doctors Without Borders presentation during World Health Week. (photo by Dana Johnson)
Access to medicine crucial
to ending diseases worldwide
Research and development for drugs for neglected diseases such as sleeping sickness, tuberculosis and malaria is currently at a standstill, said Nicolas de Torrente, Ph.D., executive director of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) USA.
Of 1,393 new drugs developed between 1975 and 1999, only 11 were for tropical diseases and only three of those were directly from research and development divisions of pharmaceutical companies, de Torrente said.
“For the most neglected diseases, there’s no market at all,” he said at a keynote speech during World Health Week, a weeklong series of lectures sponsored by the Committee for International Medical Educational Experiences and Vanderbilt University Schools of Medicine and Nursing. “There are very few people speaking up for people with these diseases,” he said.
de Torrente’s topic was “Access to Essential Medicines: Defining the Crisis and Facing Challenges.”
Prior to joining the U.S. office of Doctors Without Borders in 2001, de Torrente worked extensively for the organization, first as an administrator and head of mission in Tanzania and Rwanda, and later as an emergency coordinator in Somalia, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Macedonia, and Afghanistan. He recently returned from a monthlong field mission in Afghanistan.
Doctors Without Borders, founded in 1971 and begun in the United States in 1990, has a staff of 15,000 and more than 2,500 volunteers working each year in more than 80 countries. About 110 of those volunteers are from the United States, he said.
Although the success of the organization is “modest,” one of the key achievements has been helping secure the production of essential drugs such as elflornithine, used to treat sleeping sickness.
Working with the World Health Organization, Doctors Without Borders helped see that out-of-production elflornithine was brought back into production. Prior to the re-emergence of that drug, the only drug available for treating sleeping sickness was melarsoprol, an arsenic-based drug with toxic side effects.
de Torrente said that Bristol-Myers Squibb has turned over the drug’s patent to the World Health Organization and a five-year supply is currently kept in stock.