BioCentury
ARTICLE | Product Development

Third World solutions

March 28, 2005 8:00 AM UTC

For years, the prevailing belief among international and non-profit organizations has been that vaccines for developing countries should be given away or provided at pennies per dose. This view often has been actively hostile to the idea that vaccine developers in the private sector need to make money on their investments.

This system was able to stumble along as long as the vaccines given to people in industrialized and developing countries were more or less the same, so that companies could recoup their investments in regions that could afford to pay. But three factors have converged to change the equation...