How drugs and vaccines get approved is often a business, not medical, process

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Podcasts Take Two

Aug 12, 2014

Listen • 5:10

How drugs and vaccines get approved is often a business, not medical, process

The race to develop a vaccine for the Ebola virus might conjure up an image of doctors and drug makers rushing furiously out of good will to find a treatment. But in reality, it's more of a business transaction.

A picture taken on June 28, 2014 shows a member of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) putting on protective gear at the isolation ward of the Donka Hospital in Conakry, where people infected with the Ebola virus are being treated. The World Health Organization has warned that Ebola could spread beyond hard-hit Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone to neighbouring nations, but insisted that travel bans were not the answer. To date, there have been 635 cases of haemorrhagic fever in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, most confirmed as Ebola. A total of 399 people have died, 280 of them in Guinea. AFP PHOTO / CELLOU BINANI

The race to develop a vaccine for the Ebola virus might conjure up an image of doctors and drug makers rushing furiously out of good will to find a treatment. But in reality, it's more of a business transaction.

The race to develop a vaccine for the Ebola virus might conjure up an image of doctors and drug makers rushing furiously out of good will to find a treatment.

But in reality, how drugs make it past research and development into the hands of aid workers is, well, much more of a business transaction.

Kenneth Kaitin, professor and director of the Tufts Center for Drug Development at the Tufts School of Medicine, joins Take Two to explain the economic motivations that bring many drugs to market.