Prizes, Not Profits

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz in the current British Medical Journal has endorsed proposals to finance drug innovation through a prize fund. This approach has been championed for several years by the Consumer Project on Technology, which is run by Jamie Love.

Earlier this year, Love won one of the coveted MacArthur Foundation "genius" grants. His dogged determination to get the idea of the prize into the public domain is proof of the age-old concept that genius is one-tenth inspiration and nine-tenths perspiration. As we get set to power down for the Xmas holidays, it's fitting that I salute Love's latest endorsement. I've always operated as if only the power of an idea mattered in the so-called marketplace of ideas. But as in most markets, ideas need grease to gain traction and his obviously has.

Way to go Jamie.

For those not familiar with the concept, a prize fund would be established by government (or a consortium of governments) to reward innovations in medicine based on their usefulness. So a vaccine for malaria would take a bigger share of the fund than the fifth or sixth statin drug, which would probably get very little. The intellectual property would then be turned over to generic manufacturers to provide health care systems around the world with the lowest possibly priced medicines, so the maximum number of people would get to use them.

As Stiglitz put it, the prize fund "holds the promise that in the future more money will be spent on research than on advertising and marketing of drugs, and that research concentrates on diseases that matter."