As High-Level Week at the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly continued in New York, the delegation of the H.E. Toyin Saraki Global Policy and Philanthropy Office and the Wellbeing Foundation Africa was represented on the panel Trade, Tariffs, Manufacturing and Investment in Personalised Medicine by my Director of Global Health Policy, Advocacy and Communications, Zelia Bukhari, at MFN, Trade and Tariffs, The Future of Personalised Medicine, chaired by Dr Denis Horgan, Secretary General of the International Alliance for Personalised Medicine.

Zelia joined a panel moderated by Dr Vivek Subbiah of the Stanford Cancer Institute, with Prashant Yadav of the Council on Foreign Relations, Dr Mitchell Elkind of the American Heart Association, Josep Figueras of the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies and Dr Oscar Arrieta Rodríguez of the Instituto Nacional de Cancerología in Mexico, following a keynote earlier in the afternoon on when trade policy becomes health policy, in which Dr John Longshore of AstraZeneca joined Professor Michael Makanga of EDCTP and colleagues from Brazil and the United States.

Personalised medicine travels a long pathway, from research to clinical trial, diagnostic test, treatment and follow-up, and a tariff, a localisation rule or a pricing decision taken in one market can interrupt it in every other. A woman in Lagos or Ilorin cannot benefit from a targeted therapy her hospital cannot obtain, nor from a biomarker test her laboratory cannot run, which is why my office highlighted that access depends equally upon the pathologists, the laboratories, the workforce and the data systems that make precision possible.

The conference concluded with the New York Principles on MFN, Trade and Personalised Medicine, calling for a patient-access test on all major pricing, tariff and localisation measures, and for the assessment of their international spillovers upon smaller and lower-income markets. Our thanks to Dr Horgan for the invitation.

 

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