By BT Slingsby for Devex.

A biotech company CEO approached me at a conference recently with a potential solution for a rapid point-of-care diagnostic for tuberculosis. This is a disease with nearly 9 million new cases and over a million deaths annually, a disease that desperately needs a rapid diagnostic since patients with active TB, if left undiagnosed, can infect an average of 10-15 additional people each year.

The first fund of its kind globally, the GHIT Fund is an international nonprofit funded jointly by the Japanese government, Japanese pharmaceutical companies.

The CEO said his company could develop a product that could predict active disease and wanted to know how he could get funding to enable his company to move meaningfully into product development. This is a common problem for companies interested in creating new tools for infectious diseases of low- and middle-income countries: They possess valuable experience and capacity and a promising starting point, but current market incentives — namely pricing — fail to justify investment in the R&D. They simply can’t expect a financial return for such products.

Yet we need the private sector. Put simply, life-science companies like biotech and pharma form the only entity that can effectively develop, produce and manufacture these products.