Advance Market Commitments for Vaccines

by Alanna Shaikh · 2009-06-23 11:35:00 UTC
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(photo credit: Julien Harneis)

I mentioned advance market commitments (AMCs) the other day, and I thought you might want to know a little more about them. Basically, they are a way of encouraging pharmaceutical companies to invest in vaccine research and development. Governments or foundations promise to purchase a certain volume of vaccine, at a certain price, once developed.

This gets around one of the major problems we face in global health. Pharmaceutical companies are the only entities with the capacity and resources to develop new vaccines and treatments, but they are for-profit companies. They have no reason to invest large amounts of time and money into things without much of a profit margin.

That explain makes it sound really easy, but like all things it's harder than that. In order to make a useful commitment, donors need to do detailed demand forecasting to choose which vaccines to commit to, and how much to commit. Pharmaceutical companies need to know what level of financial commitment they require to make the research and development worthwhile. You need monitoring indicators, to make sure that the AMC is actually leading to better access to vaccines.

Five countries announced their commitment to advance market commitments in February 2007, and it took until about a week ago to work out the details to make it happen. The pilot will offer 7-10 years of support to purchase vaccines for pneumococcal diseases. I think we can accurately say that the pneumonia vaccine would not have happened without the advance market commitment for it.

For More Information

MSF has an informative website about AMCs

Alanna Shaikh
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