Students in the GHIA team are working on issues that challenge how the global health sector has traditionally developed and marketed health care products, partnerships and innovation.
As the Ebola vaccine developers transition from forming alliances to moving candidates towards regulatory approval, Duke’s Global Health Innovation Alliance recently held a workshop in Washington, D.C, to address future alliance formation, partnering roles and issues for emerging infectious disease outbreaks.
Representatives from organizations including Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, the Wellcome Trust, Bavarian Nordic, the Gates Foundation, the National Institute of Health, Biomedical Advanced Research Development Authority, among others, came together at the Duke in Washington Office to discuss GHIA’s findings and proposals.
The workshop gathered global authorities on infectious disease to work towards a common definition of “emergency” and to develop underlying principles and motivating factors for partnership formation. Industry experts weighed in on potential licensing and agreement provisions for potential emergency infectious disease outbreaks, and joined government leaders in providing feedback on potential model agreements that GHIA has developed to improve alliance formation for future outbreaks.
Moving forward, GHIA will incorporate perspectives from the public, private and non-profit sector to develop incentives, actionable tools and alternative partnering mechanisms. A follow-up symposium is planned for the spring.
GHIA is a part of the Innovation and Technology Policy Lab at Duke. Since the 2014 Ebola outbreak, the team has researched alliances formation to combat infectious disease and considered their implications for addressing future global health crises. The students planning the conference participated in the lab’s Bass Connections team.