Conference abstract
Why sub-Saharan Africa should instead opt for a local plant-based drug pharmaceutical industry?
Pan African Medical Journal - Conference Proceedings. 2023:17(86).04
Jun 2023.
doi: 10.11604/pamj-cp.2023.17.86.1546
Archived on: 04 Jun 2023
Contact the corresponding author
Keywords: Healthcare needs, African traditional medicine, plant-based drug discovery and development, safe and effective treatments
Oral presentation
Why sub-Saharan Africa should instead opt for a local plant-based drug pharmaceutical industry?
Nicole Marie Guedje1,&
1Faculty of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, University of Yaoundé I, Yaoundé, Cameroon
&Corresponding author
The need to access safe and effective medicines is so important that it has been designated as a basic human right by the World Health Organization. Still, after many efforts and initiatives carried out to locally produce medicines and harmonize regulation of medical products in African countries, insufficient access to essential, good quality and affordable medicines or medical products remains one of the biggest public health challenges in those countries. With 17% of the world’s population, the continent bears the highest burden of diseases, but only 6% of the world’s healthcare spending, 3% of the medicines produces locally, and less than 1% of the world’s pharmaceutical market. Furthermore, the African rural population has almost no access to those modern medicines and still relies on traditional medicine for basic healthcare needs. In fact, traditional medicine, mostly based on plant materials and enhanced by evidence-based research is, and will remain, that lifeblood resource on which communities around the world will be forced to rely. Therefore, exploring and investing in local plant-based drug manufacturing could constitute an alternative issue to ensure access to safe, effective, affordable, and quality treatments or medicines needed in Africa. In this paper, the relevance of the natural components of African traditional medicine is examined with emphasis on the strengths and weaknesses that could be captured as competitive advantages and genuine opportunities to promote the innovative plant-based drug industry. As most sub-Saharan African countries are at the earliest stages of pharmaceutical industry development, it is thus important to rethink their views and choices; and to weigh the public health and economic issues of whether it will be more effective to empower the current uncompetitive handful of local companies producing synthetic drugs, or to explore the traditional medicine and its derived products as health care resources for innovative plant-based drug discovery and development.
Why sub-Saharan Africa should instead opt for a local plant-based drug pharmaceutical industry?
Nicole Marie Guedje1,&
1Faculty of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, University of Yaoundé I, Yaoundé, Cameroon
&Corresponding author
The need to access safe and effective medicines is so important that it has been designated as a basic human right by the World Health Organization. Still, after many efforts and initiatives carried out to locally produce medicines and harmonize regulation of medical products in African countries, insufficient access to essential, good quality and affordable medicines or medical products remains one of the biggest public health challenges in those countries. With 17% of the world’s population, the continent bears the highest burden of diseases, but only 6% of the world’s healthcare spending, 3% of the medicines produces locally, and less than 1% of the world’s pharmaceutical market. Furthermore, the African rural population has almost no access to those modern medicines and still relies on traditional medicine for basic healthcare needs. In fact, traditional medicine, mostly based on plant materials and enhanced by evidence-based research is, and will remain, that lifeblood resource on which communities around the world will be forced to rely. Therefore, exploring and investing in local plant-based drug manufacturing could constitute an alternative issue to ensure access to safe, effective, affordable, and quality treatments or medicines needed in Africa. In this paper, the relevance of the natural components of African traditional medicine is examined with emphasis on the strengths and weaknesses that could be captured as competitive advantages and genuine opportunities to promote the innovative plant-based drug industry. As most sub-Saharan African countries are at the earliest stages of pharmaceutical industry development, it is thus important to rethink their views and choices; and to weigh the public health and economic issues of whether it will be more effective to empower the current uncompetitive handful of local companies producing synthetic drugs, or to explore the traditional medicine and its derived products as health care resources for innovative plant-based drug discovery and development.
