Wealthy countries should do more to enable pharmaceutical companies to transfer drugs and equipment to the developing world, according to a leading industry body.

A new report from the IFPMA – an international umbrella body of pharmaceutical companies and industry groups – warns that while middle-income countries are successfully collaborating on technology transfer projects, low-income countries are in danger of being left behind.

“Those parts of the world least equipped to benefit today from technology transfer are among those who need its products the most,” says the report.

As well as developing countries being more welcoming to potential partners, IFPMA says wealthier nations should increase the funding they allocate to healthcare in poorer countries. Support from richer countries could also provide for “meaningful involvement” of researchers from poorer countries, the new report suggests, by increasing access to international standard-setting bodies such as the International Conference on Harmonisation.

Although it is clearly in pharma companies’ interests to open up new markets in these countries via ‘technology transfer’, such agreements are also a boon for the recipient nations insists Antonio de Pádua Barbosa, director of production at the Bio-Manguinhos Institute, part of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) in Brazil.

Fiocruz is a vaccine research body attached to the Brazilian Ministry of Health and has partnered with a number of pharma companies to manufacture vaccines for the country’s health programme, one of the examples of good practice listed in the new report.

The companies involved get access to the lucrative governmental vaccine programme, says Barbosa, but these activities have also boosted the country’s own research base.

“Nowadays we refuse to receive only the technology – we want something more,” he says.