bn is far too little. Won’t it cost much more than this to develop an HIV vaccine?
The proposed advance market commitment is designed to provide a return of the same size as the average sales revenues for new medicines. If scientific complexity means that R&D costs are much higher for an HIV vaccine than for other medicines, then $3bn may be too low to stimulate sufficient investment. This is something sponsors should look carefully at when finalizing the commitment. Sponsors may wish to err on the side of a low commitment, as it remains open to them to augment the commitment later if it does not provoke the intended response. Such augmentation might take the form of additional investment in “push” funding, or enhancing the size of the advance market commitment. Note that, if the commitment is too small to stimulate industry investment, and therefore does not succeed, there is no cost to the sponsors.
