'The spirit of Dr Paul Janssen is still guiding us,' says J&J's head of public health

As the recent G20 Summit kicked off amid unprecedented civil unrest, advocates and lobbyists of every stripe descended on Hamburg in an effort to push their agenda.

For Jaak Peeters, head of global public health at Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ), that means persuading world leaders to invest more in projects to check some of the world’s most challenging and injurious diseases.

“We need support from government and political leaders,” Dr Peeters says. “When you consider the UN sustainable development goals up to 2030, which are extremely ambitious, we can only achieve these if we form powerful public-private partnerships.”

“We will do our part, but we also need incentivization to continue non-commercial products.”

Dr Peeters began his career at Janssen, now the pharma arm of J&J, almost four decades ago. In that time, HIV/AIDS has spread in Africa with devastating consequences.

About 70% of new HIV infections and AIDS-related deaths now occur in Sub-Saharan Africa, a region which accounts for about 12% of the world’s population.

However, since the peak of the AIDS crisis in 1997, the number of new infections has dropped by a quarter in this part of the world.

Under the auspices of the United Nations, a large number of organizations have come together to fight the disease, with some success. 

Pharmaceutical companies, working with governments and charities such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust are making a difference. But the war is far from won.

"People who are on treatment today can live a normal life if they continue to take their medication every day,” Dr Peeters says. “But it's calculated that by 2020, not 15 but 30 million patients should be on treatment.”

“The other challenge is that more and more patients are becoming resistant to first-line treatment, so we need to be prepared to tackle that.”

“We are focusing on new technologies in maintenance treatment, including a long-acting injectable - which would be a major innovation, as taking all these pills is a challenge, and poor adherence encourages resistance."

Appealing to national interest

Motivating governments and politicians to act requires a political strategy. For J&J’s public health team, that means drawing attention to the national consequences of international health issues.

External affairs leader Ronan Collins explains: "That's why pandemic threats, antimicrobial resistance, tuberculosis, made the G20 communique. Not because they are addressing a threat to the world, because they recognize the risk to their own populations."

To support this strategy and to raise awareness, J&J has invested to fund advocacy group Global Citizen in their work, and a documentary called Unseen Enemy, focusing on pandemic threats, that aired in the USA, Germany, France and elsewhere.

J&J finances these projects because it recognizes the value of enlisting the public's support to motivate governments to act.

Mr Collins adds: "We are in an inward looking world, we've seen that in the USA, and the UK - it's critical that we keep our heads up and recognize threats outside our borders."

Poverty and the spirit of Dr Janssen

Reviewing the G20’s final declaration, Dr Peeters points to three major topics - safeguarding against the next crisis, strengthening health systems in poorer countries, and combating antimicrobial resistance, as key accomplishments.

He says: “We are working on HIV, tuberculosis, ebola - many of these diseases are made possible through poverty.”

“Even if we have new products and make them affordable, we find that not much happens. That is because in many affected countries there is a lack of delivery of care to patients.”

At the turn of the millennium, the annual cost of treating HIV/AIDS was about $10,000 per person. Thanks to fierce competition beween Indian generics drugmakers, the price tag dropped about 99%.

Dr Peeters says: “As a commercial business, of course, the prioritization is always going where the commercial opportunities are.”

“But we want to contribute, and we have proven that with the ebola vaccine we developed, and also with Sirturo (bedaquiline), the first new antibiotic against multi-drug resistant tuberculosis in the last 40 or 50 years."

Recalling his earlier years in Belgium, Dr Peeters says: “There is a little bit of the spirit of Dr Janssen, that we still have in the company, and that guides us every day."

"We don't want treatments to be available for higher income countries first and then many years later for lower income ones. We want to find ways to make them available for all patients in the world who need them, at the same time.”