The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), Global Health Progress (GHP), International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), Infectious Disease Research Institute (IDRI), Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) and World Health Organization's Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases (TDR), have joined together to prepare a set of multi-sector case studies to identify ways in which key stakeholders are addressing global health concerns.

The Case Studies for Global Health illustrate how people, organizations, companies and governments have worked together to try to solve a global health challenge. The wide range of topics include the complexity of intellectual property, length and stage of product development, costs and nature of manufacturing, purchasers and markets, financing mechanisms, regulatory issues, capacity building, delivery mechanisms and adoption hurdles.

These studies will briefly describe existing or planned collaborative relationships, projects and transactions with the aim of sharing lessons learned with the wider global health community. They cover many parts of the spectrum of global health work and a variety of disease conditions—for example, leishmaniasis, malaria, buruli ulcer, rabies, and HIV/AIDS—as well as current practices and lessons learned in the course of conducting business and structuring partnerships to deal with these conditions.

Every situation described in these case studies presents its own set of challenges and we acknowledge that there is no single approach that will ensure success. The parties learned through trial and error and built upon previous successes and failures.

Specific Objectives:

• Illustrate how various people, organizations, companies and governments have approached a wide range of global health issues.
  
• Describe how different actors have addressed key elements of product development across a wide range of health interventions, such as complexity of IP, length and stage of development, costs and nature of manufacturing, purchasers and markets, regulatoryissues, distribution mechanisms and adoption hurdles.
• Persuade "potential stakeholders" to get involved by showing that their peers are already working on various problems and providing examples of how these problems could be addressed.
• Create efficiencies by describing what course of action and approaches have shown to work and where issues arise in the course of addressing a global health concern.
• Generate greater awareness of, and broaden support for, those people, organizations and governments that are spending time and resources on addressing global health concerns.
• Generate greater awareness of factors that impact a stakeholder's willingness or ability to be involved (or it's technology or funding to be utilized) in a given global health related activity, including the complexity of interactions, as well as changing competitive, economic and political environments.
  
• Identify gaps in global health and areas that require more attention and investment.
• Identify success stories, opportunities and challenges to innovation in developing countries.
• Initiate dialogue between and with global health actors to discuss how to overcome common barriers
  

Note: In October 2009, the Alliance published the first edition of 32 case studies in hard copy format. Some hard copies are still available. Contact Jill Hronek, Managing Editor, at [email protected]. Fifteen of those case studies were updated for this digital edition and are marked with "UPDATE" in the title. Links to/from the original case studies and the updates are provided within the articles.