SciDev.Net

This paper analyses the development of South Korea's hepatitis B vaccine industry. In particular, it examines how intellectual property and drug and vaccine regulations affected the industry's development.

Growth of South Korea's hepatitis B vaccine industry was supported by joint ventures allowing the acquisition of foreign knowledge, the potential market for the vaccine and the availability of skilled manpower. Also vital to the process were improvements in South Korea's regulations, which brought them more into line with international standards. The authors show that South Korea's success has policy implications for other countries. To reach the higher stages of innovative development in the biomedical industry, they say, developing countries examine R&D in the public and private sectors, high manufacturing standards, national and international distribution systems, intellectual property systems and regulatory systems.

This review puts the HIV/AIDS epidemic into perspective against other new and re-emerging diseases that have raged among human populations since the beginning of agriculture around 10,000 years ago, including SARS, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE)/variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) and Nipah fever, and old diseases such as tuberculosis and cholera. The authors argue that with a better understanding of how the emergence of such diseases is governed by changes in human ecology – such as movement, environment, living conditions and social interactions – we may be in a better position to anticipate when and where there is a risk of another new disease appearing.