IF YOU want to do something well, do it yourself. Newly industrialised countries of the “south” are developing cheap treatments for neglected tropical diseases, filling the void left by western drug firms, which focus on diseases of the rich.
The world’s poorest people suffer from tropical diseases such as rabies, hookworm and . Yet few treatments have been developed by big pharma: of 1556 drugs approved between 1975 and 2004, only 21 were for such diseases.
Now the first inventory of drugs developed by small southern companies to tackle diseases of the poor reveals a further 62…
