header
About the TB Alliance
Business Model




London School of Economics Report Recent independent research by the London School of Economics confirms that PDPs are highly cost-efficient, and that they have accelerated promising candidate products through development stages more quickly than either public or private sector entities acting alone.

> London School of Economics and Wellcome Trust, "New Landscape of Neglected Disease Drug Development"
[.pdf - 900kb]

Global Health PDPs

Business Model

The TB Alliance is a product development partnership (PDP), working to develop new, simpler, faster-acting TB treatments. We operate as a virtual R&D organization, minimizing costs, and optimizing the speed of drug development.

A PDP is a non-profit organization that builds partnerships between the public, private, academic, and philanthropic sectors to drive the development of new products for underserved markets. Through their unique, collaborative efforts, PDPs are able to access a variety of funding sources, and to apply a wide range of tools and knowledge to their programs. PDPs retain direct management oversight of their projects, though much of the work is done though external research facilities and contractors. In the global health arena, PDPs have been established to accelerate the development of new technologies that fight TB, AIDS, malaria, and a wide range of neglected diseases. PDPs are created for the public good; their products are made affordable to all those who need them.

The TB Alliance combines the research and development expertise of its own staff with the skills and resources of its partners to streamline and accelerate TB drug development. The organization manages a portfolio of candidate TB compounds, from both public and private sector sources, using a variety of licensing and partnership agreements.

Such cooperative efforts allow us to apply the latest scientific advances, and the highest technical capabilities, to our drug development efforts. By operating as a virtual R&D organization to minimize costs, including overhead and investments in infrastructure, our business model helps to optimize the speed of development.

   This flexible structure produces an agile organization that is responsive to the latest innovations, optimizes assets and dramatically reduces overhead.

The TB Alliance works with partners around the world to ensure affordability. We include consideration for cost-of-goods in the selection of portfolio compounds, giving preference to those that can be easily and cost-effectively synthesized, formulated, and administered. All agreements are structured to curtail costs not related to product development such as licensing fees, milestone payments and royalties, and include upfront pricing considerations. Manufacturing rights and technology transfer provisions are geared to attain the lowest production cost and, whenever appropriate, encourage competition.

Research & development for neglected tropical diseases receives only $1 out of every $100,000 spent worldwide on biomedical research and product development. Over the past decade, global health PDPs like the TB Alliance have advanced dozens of potential new diagnostics, drugs, vaccines, and microbicides through the development pipeline, toward registration and launch. PDPs are able to mobilize private sector participation to develop new technologies where there is no market incentive. PDPs also fill a crucial gap: basic academic research in non-profitable fields is translated into actual product development, evaluation, and use — with the potential to save millions of lives.