FIND announces innovative partnership with Janssen to accelerate access to TB diagnosis, treatment & care

Cape Town, South Africa – 3 December 2015 – FIND is pleased to announce an innovative collaborative agreement with Janssen Pharmaceutica NV (Janssen) to accelerate access to tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis, treatment and care.

The agreement, the first of its kind for both organizations, formalizes a strategic partnership to increase access to diagnostic tools for TB case detection and multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) diagnosis, and to accelerate post-diagnosis links to the most effective treatments. This partnership brings together a leading pharmaceutical company with a long history of improving access to needed medicines with FIND’s innovative work as a non-profit in increasing access to affordable diagnostic solutions that meet the needs of low- and middle-income countries, including the data generation and delivery of all six WHO-endorsed diagnostic tools for TB in the past decade.

“The growing rates of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis make this complex public health problem an increasingly urgent priority,” said Wim Parys, M.D., Head of R&D, Janssen Global Public Health. “We see this innovative collaboration with FIND as a highly effective way to accelerate sustainable solutions in the TB diagnostics to treatment continuum.”

Janssen and FIND will collaborate on a variety of projects with other partners, including diagnostics developers and national TB control programmes, to close the gaps on the more than 3 million people with undiagnosed TB globally and the more than 30% of people with diagnosed TB who are not appropriately treated.

“In addition to the many people who are never diagnosed at all, more than one in ten with a confirmed TB diagnosis never gets started on treatment, while others face unacceptable delays between diagnosis and treatment. To make things worse, most people with MDR-TB are diagnosed only after treatment failure,” said Catharina Boehme, FIND CEO. “By partnering with Janssen, we see important opportunities to strengthen the links to effective treatment following diagnosis, and to greatly improve access to diagnosis for drug-resistant TB.”

“FIND and Janssen have highly complementary expertise in diagnostics and treatment,” said Claudia Denkinger, Head of TB & Hepatitis C Programmes at FIND. “Together we can leverage this collective capacity to ensure that people with TB have access to rapid and accurate diagnosis and are quickly linked to effective treatment and care, whether they have drug-susceptible or drug-resistant TB.”

FIND and Janssen are committed to transforming access to a continuum of diagnostics and therapeutic solutions to deliver sustainable impact at scale in TB and multidrug-resistant TB, and may in future also consider adding other priority health areas.

Geneva-based consultancy Global Development (GD) played an important role in identifying synergies and converging objectives leading to this announcement.

#####

About FIND
FIND was established in 2003 as a global non-profit dedicated to accelerating the development, evaluation and delivery of high-quality, affordable diagnostic tests for poverty-related diseases, including tuberculosis, malaria, HIV/AIDS, Ebola, sleeping sickness, hepatitis C, leishmaniasis, Chagas disease and Buruli ulcer. Over the last decade, FIND has partnered in the delivery of 11 new diagnostic tools, including six for tuberculosis, and created an enabling environment for countless more through the provision of specimen banks, reagent development and better market visibility. FIND also supports better access to new diagnostics through implementation, quality assurance and lab strengthening work. FIND has over 100 partners globally, including research institutes and laboratories, ministries of health and national disease control programmes, commercial partners, bilateral and multilateral organizations, especially WHO, and clinical trial sites.

About Global Development
Global Development – Advising the Leaders (GD) is a Geneva-based consultancy group focused on catalysing and developing transformational partnerships between industry and other stakeholders in global health and sustainable development. Under the leadership of its principal Barbara Bulc, GD provides unique strategic guidance and intelligence to connect leaders with new opportunities and help them reach scale and sustainability for social and economic impact.

For more information, please contact:
Julie Archer, Senior Communications Officer, FIND
Email: Julie.Archer@finddx.org
Desk +41 22 749 2933
Mobile +41 79 830 63 64