# Pooled procurement and voluntary licensing for essential cancer medicines in low-income countries

Source: https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-moon-pooled-procurement-licensing-pool/  
OnCo record `idea-moon-pooled-procurement-licensing-pool` (Idea). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Buy essential cancer drugs for many countries at once and license newer ones to generic makers, as was done for HIV, so prices fall to what those health systems can pay.

## Summary

HIV treatment reached tens of millions because the Medicines Patent Pool, pooled procurement and tiered pricing lowered costs by over 90%. Cancer has partial efforts (the ATOM Coalition, pooled tenders for childhood cancer drugs) but no comprehensive mechanism. The proposal is a cancer medicines pool: voluntary licences from originators for defined territories on a core list (trastuzumab, imatinib, pembrolizumab or biosimilar checkpoint inhibitors, and generics with supply problems), pooled multi-country tenders, quality assurance and supply security, financed with development bank guarantees.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- Hypothesis: Pooled licensing and procurement cut prices of listed medicines by over 70% in participating countries and increase the treated fraction of eligible patients severalfold within five years.
- Rationale: Volume, predictability and competition among licensed manufacturers are what drove HIV prices down; the same levers are available for cancer biologics and small molecules.
- Proposed test: Pilot pooled procurement of five essential medicines across ten countries; measure price, availability and treatment rates against baseline.
- Maturity: early-clinical
- Actor: policy

## Sources

- Medicines Patent Pool: https://medicinespatentpool.org/
- WHO Model List of Essential Medicines: https://list.essentialmeds.org/

## Connected records

- drugs: [Imatinib](https://onco.cc/drugs/imatinib/), [Pembrolizumab](https://onco.cc/drugs/pembrolizumab/), [Trastuzumab](https://onco.cc/drugs/trastuzumab/)
- bottlenecks: [Most of the world has almost no cancer care](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-global-access/), [Prices and value](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-drug-pricing/)

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