The following editorial appeared Thursday in The Washington Post.

For obvious reasons, pharmaceutical companies generally don’t rush to develop drugs for use in poorer countries. These businesses face strong financial incentives to seek profits formulating the next Viagra for sale in developed countries with paying customers and robust patent laws. Meanwhile, funds to buy drugs for the developing world often are unreliable as donations follow development fads, which means that if a drug company did decide to produce, say, a new sleeping sickness medication for sale in impoverished nations, there is a risk that it would not find a viable market from which it could recoup even its research investment. That’s a hard sell to shareholders.

But recently, public health experts have been experimenting with innovative ways of encouraging research and production of medications for so-called neglected diseases. Two such experiments have generated results that promise to save untold numbers of lives in the developing world.

A partnership consisting of the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative and the Paris-based pharmaceutical company Sanofi-Aventis announced that it has developed and will produce at cost a new anti-malaria drug. Sanofi-Aventis agreed not to seek a patent for the medication, meaning that generic drug manufacturers can immediately and legally produce the medication on their own, too, which promises to suppress the drug’s already low price. Health advocates hope other pharmaceutical companies will follow.

This may remain a unique success, however. Most of the research and development of the new anti-malarial occurred before the partnership was formed; the scientific breakthrough in this case was in how Sanofi-Aventis combined two existing drugs. This made the development relatively inexpensive. In addition, large international funds to fight malaria all but guarantee that someone will buy the drug. Bernard Pecoul of the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative admits that other mechanisms and incentives may be needed to spur development of drugs that will be more complicated – and expensive – to produce.

In February, a consortium of mostly European nations supported a different approach aimed at attracting drug companies into research and development. The consortium pledged $1.5 billion to buy a vaccine against pneumococcus, one of the developing world’s deadliest strains of bacteria, from any company that could develop it and sell it at a set price. Drug companies have an incentive to invest in pneumococcus research because they are guaranteed a market if they develop the vaccine. This strategy of pulling, rather than pushing, drug companies into research and development is still unproven; it may not work if prices are set too low or if the research required is too difficult.

Still, it is exciting to see governments, nongovernmental organizations and private firms collaborate on such initiatives. One model might prove more successful. Or each of these approaches might turn out to be an efficient solution for different drug development tasks. Let the experimentation continue.