Pharmaceuticals and Security: Strengthening Industry Engagement
Future directions in public-private collaboration for health security
Hosted by the Centre for Global Health Policy, University of Sussex
Friday 7 February 2014, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm
Conference Room @ The Royal Institution of Great Britain
21 Albemarle Street, Mayfair, London W1S 4BS
Populations need to be protected against acute cross-border health threats – such as pandemics, bioterrorism, and endemic infectious diseases. So how can novel medicines be developed to better protect citizens? The process of discovering innovative pharmaceuticals is too costly and complex for most governments. Yet many pharmaceutical companies also disregard health security as a commercially not very rewarding area. This high-level, invitation-only roundtable brings together leaders from government, the pharmaceutical industry, global health initiatives, and academia to identify key lessons about fostering successful public-private collaborations in the area of health security. The roundtable will tease out those lessons by encouraging participants to share and compare their respective experiences across three distinct areas of health security: pandemic preparedness, bioterrorism, and endemic infectious diseases. The roundtable is particularly keen to assess how recent developments in industry and policy are shaping the prospects for moving such collaborations forward, especially:
- How is the rise of biotechnology companies as important drivers of pharmaceutical innovation affecting collaborations in the field of health security?
- What are the implications of recent political controversies around antiviral stockpiling for the willingness of pharmaceutical companies to engage in the area of health security?
- How could the growing capacity of companies from middle-income countries in pharmaceutical manufacturing and innovation generate new health security collaborations?
The roundtable will be held under the Chatham House rule so that participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speakers, nor that of any other participant, may be revealed. This event is supported by the European Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom. This is an invitation only event.
