Fighting for affordable medicine

The pharmaceutical industry generates billions each year, and people in developing nations can be priced out of the market.

But one Penn student group wants to change that by tackling high drug prices where medicines originate - with scientific researchers, including those at Penn.

Penn's chapter of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines is targeting university presidents across the nation and asking them to "have socially responsible [drug] licensing practices at their universities," said McGill University graduate student Caroline Gallant, who serves on the group's coordinating committee.

UAEM's goal, group member and Penn medical student Dave Chokshi said, is to "improve access to medicines in poor countries." The group is trying "to attack that problem where [it] has some type of leverage," he said - with the university laboratories where medicines are often developed.

The group hosted the national UAEM conference earlier this fall, which about 60 Penn students attended, according to Chokshi.

During the conference, the group formed the Philadelphia Consensus Statement, which "puts [UAEM's] efforts into concrete principles," said third-year Law student and UAEM member Erin Talati.

It asks universities to "promote equal access to research, promote research and development for neglected diseases and measure research success according to impact on human welfare."

The statement is the latest move by the group, one of Penn's fastest-growing, which Chokshi started last year.

The organization was founded at Yale University in 2001, Gallant said.

And while their goals are ambitious, Director of Penn's Center for Bioethics Art Caplan thinks the group might be able to make some headway.

"There is a drive to make medicines affordable in the third world, and researchers do understand the moral need to do that," Caplan said. "I don't think Penn can do it alone, but I think Penn can be a leader."

The group has solicited letters to Gutmann from 14 faculty members and has successfully lobbied the Undergraduate Assembly, Graduate and Professional Student Assembly and Medical Student Government to pass resolutions supporting its cause.

Chokshi called the changes they proposed in September's Consensus Statement "realistic" but said that they need to be embraced by Gutmann and Provost Ron Daniels in order to have an effect.

John Zawad - managing director of Penn's Center for Technology Transfer, which controls patents and copyrights on researchers' scientific discoveries - did not immediately return phone calls for comment. The center also works with pharmaceutical companies to get drugs discovered at Penn on the market.

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