Increasing Access to Better Heart Failure Treatments
We live in a great age of medical discovery and advancement. Today, more cancer patients are living longer due to newer drugs and therapies. Immunotherapy treatments like checkpoint inhibitors and monoclonal antibodies prevent cancers from hiding and help to boost the immune systems response to cancer. Another advancement in medicine relates to the treatment of HIV/AIDS. Antiretroviral treatments (ARV) remain one of the greatest success stories in medical research by transforming AIDS from a death sentence to a chronic disease. Today, more than 20 million people have access to ARV treatments. While in 2000, only 90 patients in South Africa were on ARV drugs, today, there are more than 4 million people.
However, patients need access to newer treatments as the virus becomes resistant to old therapies or patients develop serious side effects. The most commonly used ARV in developing countries is Stavudine. The WHO recommended for it to be phased out by 2009 due to its serious side effects. Patients in developed countries have moved on to new and better therapies like Tenofovir or Dolutegravir. However, a year’s treatment of Tenofovir can cost $176, making it financial inaccessible for patients in low-income countries. This leads to patients in developing countries having to stay on old therapies with worse outcomes than patients in developed countries who have access to universal health coverage or better credit systems.
One of our goals at mPharma is to work with pharmaceutical companies to introduce new therapies to the African market. We believe that African patients should have the same access to drugs and therapies that show better outcomes for patients in developed countries. To do this, we created a new service for pharmaceutical companies called MaaS (Market Access as a Service). The MaaS solution is built around three core themes — Affordability, Availability, and Accessibility. mPharma has developed the software, financing, and supply chain infrastructure to implement market access solutions for pharmaceutical companies in Africa. The MaaS service enables pharma companies to outsource this critical function to mPharma, utilizing a shared value/risk model.
Today, we are working with Novartis to increase access to Uperio, a new drug for treating heart failure. Uperio has shown to have better outcomes than Enalapril, a drug that was approved in 1984. A few weeks ago, I went on a roadshow across Nigeria where I met with hospitals and physicians to understand their pain points. On my stop in Port Harcourt, a cardiologist who received free samples of Uperio spoke about the tremendous outcomes her patients had experienced after she switched them to Uperio. However, she was afraid the patients would relapse after the free samples had finished since the patients would not be able to pay the current price for Uperio. She was excited about Mutti, mPharma’s interest-free credit service that enables patients to pay for drugs in installments.
If you are an HCP in Ghana or Nigeria and want to get your patients access to Mutti, please give us a call, text or WhatsApp on Ghana (0558134375) and Nigeria (09087497997).
