St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is taking on a major global health challenge—the murky quagmire of drug shortages—by partnering with the World Health Organization to prove that practical solutions are within reach.
The ambitious $200 million program, the Global Platform for Access to Childhood Cancer Medicines, is the hospital’s latest multimillion-dollar investment aimed at increasing cure rates for children with cancer in low- to middle-income countries.
Over six years, from 2022 to 2027, St. Jude and WHO will develop an international network and marketplace to get cancer medicines to approximately 120,000 children in 50 countries.
Many essential drugs fall into shortage because individual countries with limited drug purchasing programs or negotiating power don’t provide enough of a market incentive for manufacturers to produce and supply these drugs. To address the problem, the St. Jude-WHO program would use standard procurement protocols to band these fragmented markets into a large, cohesive one.
