Meeting children’s needs
Children under the age of 5 are the main victims of malaria. Yet, the majority of recommended first-line treatments for malaria have been developed only for adults. This imbalance needs to be urgently addressed.
In 2009, MMV and Novartis helped reduce this disparity by launching the first high-quality artemisinin combination therapy (ACT) formulated especially for children – Coartem® Dispersible. Working together with other drug development partners, MMV will assure that each new medicine emerging from our pipeline will also have a paediatric formulation. For today, however, the challenge is to ensure that disease-endemic countries adopt medicines that have been tailored especially to meet the needs of children.
To facilitate this change, MMV has worked with Dalberg Advisors to map out the country-level processes that enable new child-friendly treatment policies for malaria to be adopted. The team selected Rwanda, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Zambia and Senegal for study in view of their different policy environments. Exploratory meetings and interviews with experts, policy makers and National Malaria Control Programme managers were conducted to tease out the main success factors and bottlenecks to policy change. This revealed a six step process that addresses the following questions:
- Have stakeholders been informed about the existence of new medicines?
- Do the new drugs meet national drug regulatory and legal requirements?
- Are financial resources available for the new medicines?
- Are procurement and distribution systems in place?
- Is health systems implementation secured?
- Do consumers know how to use the medicines?
This framework is not specific to drugs alone, and could be used by other PDPs involved in diagnostics and vaccines.
The complete findings of the study are currently being analyzed in detail and will soon be published. But what has already emerged as a significant hurdle is the presence of data bottlenecks; to expedite policy change, decision-makers, influencers, and other stakeholders need up-to-date information on new treatments’ comparative efficacy and effectiveness – ahead of time.
MMV is now working closely with the WHO Essential Medicines for Children programme and its “make medicines child size” campaign to overcome this bottleneck, by relaying timely information on treatment advances to decision makers so that they can affect the much needed change.
