Anaesthetics & Covid-19 Vaccine Plant, Gqeberha: The southern hemisphere's largest general anesthetics manufacturing line, with the facility to fill and package the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine.Waldo Swiegers/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The board of the African Development Bank (AfDB) recently approved the establishment of the African Pharmaceutical Technology Foundation to transform the indigenous African pharmaceutical industry. The institution is the latest effort to enhance Africa’s access to the technologies that underpin the manufacture of medicines, vaccines, and other pharmaceutical products and decrease the continent’s reliance on importation.
AfDB’s President, Akinwumi Adesina, told Nature Africa that this reliance also harms research and development on the continent. It leaves Africa unable to produce the right medicines that fit the continent’s epidemiological profile and is at the core of Africa’s health independence.
“Because you are not able to do that, it has a knockdown effect on Africa’s ability over time to build the right R&D capacity and the ecosystems that you need to support a productive, efficient, cost competitive, global health delivery system,” he said.
When fully established, the institution would be a transparent intermediator that will broker deals and advance the interests of the African pharmaceutical sector with global and other Southern pharmaceutical companies to share IP-protected technologies, know-how, and patented processes.
It will prioritize technologies, products and processes focused primarily on diseases that are widely prevalent in Africa, including current and future pandemics.
“It will also build human and professional skills, the R&D ecosystem, and help upgrade manufacturing plant capacities and regulatory quality to meet World Health Organization standards,” Akinwunmi stated.
A three-phase agenda for R&D in Africa
While the Foundation is the latest in a line of attempts to improve Africa’s pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity, its approach is also in line with the agenda by the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) Partnerships for African Vaccine Manufacturing (PAVM) Framework for Action.
Ahmed Ogwell Ouma, Africa CDC’s acting director, finds the African Pharmaceutical Technology Foundation a step in the right direction. While admitting that, in the short term, the goal for the continent is to be able to locally produce products researched and developed elsewhere, priority on local research and development will be medium and long-term goals.
“Our approach to local production is in three phases. In the emergency phase, fill and finish will be fine for vaccines. Indeed, the final packaging of health products on the continent is fine in this phase. In the medium term, we want to start to produce what has been developed elsewhere from scratch. Finally, in the long term, we want to have our research institutions come up with products that then we can take through production to be ready for market.
“So it is a journey,” Ouma said.
While stressing the importance of developing Africa’s R&D sector, Ouma argued the goal should not be for Africa to go in all alone. “We still need technology transfer.
“We still need intellectual property sharing. We still need the WTO TRIPS flexibility to be able to grow the manufacturing enterprise here on the continent of Africa. As we do that, we are also working with the member states to keep the research going on,” he said.
