U of T falls behind in tropical research
Diseases like sleeping sickness, river blindness fail to attract interest of drug companies
The University of British Columbia is the No. 1 college in North America when it comes to prioritizing medical research for neglected diseases, according to a new university ranking — but other leading institutions, including the University of Toronto, are falling behind the pack.
The findings come from a new “report card” that evaluated 54 universities according to their emphasis on neglected diseases — exotic ailments like yaws, sleeping sickness and river blindness that have an impact on more than one billion people worldwide but fail to attract the interest of drug companies.
Universities play a major role in filling this gap — but some North American institutions aren’t pulling their weight, according to California-based Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM), the student-driven nonprofit that compiled the report card.
The report card found that, on average, only 2.88 per cent of research funding at top North American universities in 2010 went toward neglected diseases, which have an estimated global disease burden of between 10 and 15 per cent.
“Universities regularly position themselves as institutions that are devoted to learning and discovery for the benefit of the world,” said UAEM president Rachel Kiddell-Monroe. “So now students . . . are calling them up on that claim.”
“Unfortunately, what our report card has revealed is that the majority of the major research universities, including leading research institutions, are not living up to their mission.”
According to the report card, UBC was best in class, receiving the only “A” grade and edging out academic heavyweights such as Johns Hopkins and Harvard. Coming in last was the University of Iowa.
Four other Canadian universities were also ranked, including McMaster University (which came 21st), the University of Alberta (22nd), McGill (30th) and the University of Toronto, which was 42nd and got a D-minus.
This is the first time this report card has been issued and UAEM acknowledged some shortcomings in its methodology, largely due to the difficulty of comparing universities of varying sizes, resources and governments.
The report card also takes a narrow look at global health impact, said Janet Hatcher Rob- erts, executive director of the Canadian Society for International Health.
She said the report card’s title — “university global health impact report card” — is misleading because global health is about much more than neglected tropical diseases. And increasingly, “neglected diseases” in a Third World context can mean anything from mental health to chronic diseases, both ignored by the report card, she pointed out.
The universities were evaluated using 14 performance indicators in three categories: innovation (proportion of overall research devoted to neglected diseases), access (ensuring developing countries have access to their biomedical discoveries) and empowerment (how well universities are “preparing the next generation of global health leaders”).
Although U of T received an A grade for “empowerment,” it failed in the innovation and access categories. Some universities, such as UBC, have publicly and formally committed to being socially responsible when licensing their medical breakthroughs to drug companies; U of T, however, has not, according to UAEM executive director Bryan Collinsworth.
Being socially responsible in this context might mean adopting non-exclusive licensing provisions, which would give access to generic drug companies so they can make affordable versions of the drug in low-income countries.
It is unclear what proportion of U of T licences are non-exclusive — the university never responded to a UAEM survey asking this question, Collinsworth said. When reached Thursday, a U of T spokesperson said the university needed more time to evaluate the report card’s methodologies.
But only 31per cent of universities responded to questions about their licensing and patenting practices — and this likely caused some “vagaries” in the report card’s results, said Angus Livingstone, managing director of UBC’s university-industry liaison office.
Developing a new drug can be extremely costly and take upwards of 12 years, Livingstone said. And some universities worry that adding licensing provisions to ensure ThirdWorld access could jeopardize a drug’s chance of reaching market — an outcome that would benefit no one, he said.
“I think some universities are concerned that by . . . explicitly committing to provide Third-World country access, that may seriously inhibit their ability to do transactions in the First World,” he said.
“And it’s true, it’s one of those concerns we’ve had. We’ve just believed that we could work our way through it and I think we’ve had success in doing that.”