Never before have drug-makers lavished so much attention upon the world's poor. Boehringer Ingelheim's sparkling test labs in South Africa are outside the sprawling slums ringing Capetown. Novartis' gleaming white facility, where researchers develop new drugs in India, nestles against the smog-blackened slums of Mumbai. In recent years Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and AstraZeneca have also set up global clinical-trial hubs in India.
But they are not there to cure the impoverished sick who line up at their shiny research clinics. Drug companies have migrated to developing countries to carry out experiments. In 2006 more than half GSK's drug trials took place outside western markets, mainly in "low cost" countries like Bulgaria, Zambia, Brazil and India to which tens of thousands of clinical trials have been outsourced (1).
