Public private partnerships

Like the old PNGV program, Freedom CAR will be a public-private partnership, combining DOE s National Labs with industry and innovations at the nation s universities. 

The NIH and the pharmaceutical industry have formed a new partnership to overcome barriers to early-phase clinical trials. The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tommy Thompson, announced on July 9, 2003 grant awards for six cancer centers involved in a unique public-private partnership. Five pharmaceutical companies together with NCI put forth a total of 5.7 million for this partnership. Institutions receiving the funding include Massachusetts General Hospital University of Colorado Health Sciences Center Washington University, St. Louis University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute University of California, Davis Cancer Center and Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center (http //WWW. bms.com/news/other/data/pf other.news.385 5. html). 

Whether there are any cost-effective, flexible pull mechanisms that can supplement the patent system, is, however, an open question. Below, I examine three proposals for pull incentive mechanisms. None of them is perfect. The question is whether any of them is likely to be worth investing the billions of dollars they would likely cost, diverting money away from direct research funding and public-private partnerships. 

Ridley, R. G. 2004. Product Development Public-Private Partnerships for Diseases of Poverty, in Combating Diseases Associated with Poverty, ed. by R. Widdus and K. White. Geneva Initiative on Public-Private Partnerships for Health. 

In 1999, the Ministry of Research, in association with the Ministry of Industry, created the Fuel Cell Technological Research Network (PACo network) to contribute to French energy policy for the development of new energy sources. The purposes of the network were to foster creativity and innovation needed for the commercial development of fuel cells and to encourage public-private partnerships and facilitate interdisciplinary cooperation. In July 2000, the government launched CNRT (Centre National de Recherche Tech nolog ique) in Belfort-Montbeliard, involving the construction of a fuel cell test platform dedicated to transport applications. The fiiel cell test capacities have demonstrated power up to 200 kW. 

In November 2003, the EC also launched the European Initiative forCrowthto boost EU economic development. The initiative includes a "Quick Start Programme" with a list of projects for public/private investment in infrastructure, networks and knowledge. The aim is to encourage the creation of public/private partnerships in co-operation with the Member States and the European Investment Bank in order to leverage finance. 

Fostering Public-Private Partnerships and encouraging innovative approaches to sustainable chemicals management in developing and transition countries are additional fields of her work. She studied Economics at the Vienna University of Business Administration and Social Sciences and Environmental Management at the University of London. 

Product development public-private partnerships (p-PPPs) are collaborative organizations between non-profit and for-profit organizations. They are institutionalized with public intervention and/or funding because markets are perceived as unable to adequately connect relevant resources and capabilities between science and industry in basic research. Clearly, diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, and others that are even less well known are rampant in developing countries but are far less of a threat in most developed countries (Wheeler and Berkley 2001 Kaplan and Laing 2004). There is, therefore, little or no economic incentive to develop pharmaceutical products for these diseases (Biel 2001 Milne, Kaitin, and Ronchi 2004 Kaplan and Laing 2004). The industry s lack of enthusiasm is also a result of distribution challenges in countries with poor infrastructures and lack of awareness about these diseases in more developed countries, liability considerations, inadequate science base, and underestimation of the disease burden. Product PPPs have been developed to address... 

Figure 4.5 Number of all public-private partnerships created between 1986 and 2003...

Source Ziemba (2004). Extracted from data found on the website for Initiative on Public Private Partnerships for Health, www.ippph.org, accessed February 26, 2004. 

Kettler, H. and A. Towse. 2001. Public Private Partnerships. WHO Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, CMH Paper WG2 21. Available at http //www.cmhealth.org/docs/wg2 paper21. pdf [Accessed November 5, 2005]. 

Muraskin, W. 2002. The Last Years of the CVI and the Birth of the GAVI. In Public-Private Partnerships for Public Health, edited by Michael Reich. Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press, 115-168. 

Reich, M. 2000. Public-Private Partnerships for Public Health. Nature Medicine 6 617-620. Sykes, R. 1994. Innovation in the Pharmaceutical Industry. British Medical Journal 309 ... 

Wheeler, C. and S. Berkley. 2001. Initial Lessons from Public-Private Partnerships in Drug and Vaccine Development. Bulletin of the World Health Organization 1 i-. 

Ziemba, E. 2004. Public-Private Partnerships. In Priority Medicines for Europe and the World, edited by Warren Kaplan and Richard Laing. Geneva WHO, 100-103. Available at http //mednet3. who.int/prioritymeds/ [Accessed April 23, 2005]. 

Buse, K. and G. Walt. 2000. Global Public-Private Partnerships A New Development in Health Bulletin of the World Health Organization 78 549-561, 699-709. 

Stoll-Kleemann S. and O Riordan T. (2004). The possible role of public private partnerships. IHDP Update, 3, 6-8. 

In a similar vein, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) established WaterSense, a voluntary public-private partnership program to promote water-efficient products and services and EnergyStar, a program that promotes energy efficiency. 

The case of Golden Rice illustrated the need for imaginative ways to address intellectual property issues ways that do not require years of negotiations, expensive lawyers, or overly complex public/private partnerships to move a crop to market. This is the very large task that CAMBIA and other organizations are now undertaking. 

Perspectives of carbon taxes will be among the prime incentives for hydrogen and heat using industries to participate in public/private partnerships created to build prototypes and demonstrate clean hydrogen production technologies. Oil companies, petrochemical and steel industries are among the most exposed to additional costs imposed by carbon taxes to their current activities, as well as to future activities such as the production of synthetic fuels from coal, biomass or other hydrocarbon feedstock. 

Public-private partnerships should be encouraged as essential for the development of products and processes, and especially to leverage investment seeking to reduce the dependence on imported biopharmaceuticals. For this, it is vital that institutions adequately project their research results, to enable them to better attract investors to fund technological development. Hence, it will be possible to increase the chances that an invention will turn into an innovation. 

Nwaka S, Ridley RG (2003) Virtual drug discovery and development for neglected diseases through public-private partnerships. Nat Rev Drug Discov 2(ll) 919-928... 

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