MSF endorses USA’s Pharmaceutical Research Transparency Act

A new bill, the Pharmaceutical Research Transparency Act, was introduced yesterday in both the US House and Senate. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) endorses this bill as it would give people, governments, and treatment providers like MSF more leverage to negotiate fair drug prices.

Currently, pharma doesn’t have to disclose how much they spend on R&D to bring new drugs to market. They often say the high cost of R&D is the reason they have to charge so much for medicines. However, these companies often get taxpayer money for R&D so they aren’t paying for all of it anyway. This bill would help show how much pharma is really spending on R&D and why they charge the prices they do.

Ava Alkon, policy advisor at MSF-USA, said of the bill: “The struggle to afford medications isn’t unique to people living in the US. All over the world, our teams work in places where lifesaving medical products like pneumonia vaccines and tuberculosis drugs are priced out of reach for people who need them. The Pharmaceutical Research Transparency Act would help shine much-needed light on how much companies and other drug developers really spend to create new drugs by making the cost of clinical trials—the most expensive part of the R&D process—public.

“Knowing these costs would put MSF, the US government, and other purchasers of medicines in stronger positions to hold drug companies to account for their prices and negotiate fairer ones.

“As the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, the US government has an opportunity to lift the veil on clinical trial costs and set a new standard for transparency and accountability in research—much as it did for trial results when it created ClinicalTrials.gov.

“Passing this bill would be an important step towards fixing a broken system that has failed time and time again to make medical tools affordable and accessible for people everywhere.”