ENTERPRISING IDEALISTS

Collaborative Tech to Develop New, Affordable Drugs

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JAYKUMAR MENON — CO-FOUNDER, OPEN PHARMA

AMONG THE MANY SOCIETAL shortcomings the pandemic has laid bare, the failure to get drugs and vaccines to many people who need them is one of the most painful and urgent. For many people around the world, the shots that arrived so expeditiously to those in the rich countries are still out of reach. “It’s an outrage that billions of people have no access to the new vaccines,” says human rights lawyer Jaykumar Menon. “We need a new model.”

After years working as a lawyer and advocate, Menon saw a way to potentially help millions of people realize the “human right to healthcare.” Inspired by the software world’s concept of “Open Source,” where developers make their code freely available for others to use, adapt and share, in 2014, he co-founded the Open Source Pharma Foundation (OSPF) with a team of public health and pharmaceutical industry experts. Their goal: to revolutionize the way pharmaceuticals are developed by shifting research from expensive, proprietary, profit-driven strategies to an emphasis on sharing resources and research insights.

One troublesome consequence of the reliance on big pharmaceutical companies to bring a drug from lab to market is that it provides no incentive to invest in diseases that take a high toll on low-income nations and a dearth of treatments for rare conditions, where the pay-off for developing a new drug is seen as too small to make sense.