Far too many people have suffered and died because our medicines and medical products system was not prepared to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic with prompt and universal access to reliable tests, treatments, and vaccines. Governments, non-profits, and industry in the U.S. and around the world are working furiously to catch up. But their efforts have been hampered by fundamental flaws in our profit-driven pharmaceutical industry. For Americans with diabetes, cancer, asthma, infectious diseases, mental
“Open science”—broad, ready, equitable access to scientific knowledge, and to the data that generates that knowledge, across a drug’s entire lifecycle—is essential to focusing research and development activity on the most crucial health needs, accelerating R&D, expanding competition and preventing monopolization, and reducing costs. We must provide access to the “ means, methods, and materials ” of biomedical innovation, including various preclinical, clinical, and financial data that is currently kept mo
This could be done in two phases. In phase one, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and other public agencies—including the public sector vaccine and pharmaceutical agencies we describe below—would begin discretionary sharing of preclinical and clinical data they hold. Government-held results of experiments and clinical trials, and information on the costs of this research, can and should be shared regardless of if the results are generated by government, industr