Novartis Hopes to Overcome Malaria Drug Supply Gap

Swiss drug giant Novartis said on Tuesday it hopes to overcome a supply shortage of its new anti-malaria drug, heralded as a breakthrough against the killer tropical disease.

Production of its drug Coartem has been hit by a shortage of the Chinese herbal drug artemisinin, but Novartis officials will meet Chinese suppliers in Switzerland next week to discuss bridging the gap, spokesman Nehl Horton said.The World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Monday that poor countries will not get enough amounts of the drug.”We are working very hard to obtain adequate supplies…We are optimistic that agricultural production of artemisinin will pick up now considerably when growers see huge demand on the market,” Horton said.Novartis was in the midst of a “massive scale-up of production capacity” of Coartem, he added.Under a legally-binding agreement, Novartis is supplying the drug at a cost price to the United Nations health agency.The aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres has raised the alarm since April about a looming supply crisis of artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs).Nearly two billion people live in areas affected by the disease, which kills some 1 million children each year in Africa.”This is the story of a catastrophe known ahead of time,” said MSF expert Jean-Marie Kindermans on Tuesday. “It is the failure of a joint partnership.”Some 40 countries have endorsed ACT treatment so far, but production must increase otherwise such a project may become “wishful thinking,” said Kindermans.The WHO, which had hoped to be able to provide some 60 million treatments in 2005, said only some 2.4 million would be available between December and the beginning of March.About a dozen endemic countries — including Ethiopia and South Africa — which have already adopted Coartem as first-line treatment will get priority for limited supplies, said Andrea Bosman, a WHO medical officer. (Source: Reuters, Nov 2004)