Antimicrobial resistance causes over a million deaths globally each year, driven in part by the lack of timely diagnostic tests. MSA is designing “NeoTest” – a pull incentive to stimulate development of a rapid diagnostic for neonatal sepsis, improving care for newborns while reducing unnecessary antibiotic use.
Due to a lack of financial incentive, many potential uses for generic drugs go under-explored. We are designing pull funding mechanisms that can help incentivize firms to discover new ways generic drugs can address important health needs.
We are designing a pull mechanism to spur the innovation of platform-based broad-spectrum antivirals for pandemic preparedness. These drugs could offer breakthrough treatment options that can effectively combat a wide range of viral pathogens, including both known and future threats.
Severe pandemic outbreaks like COVID-19 are expected to occur with non-negligible frequency. To inform preparedness policy, we are modeling the benefits and costs of alternative preparedness interventions to characterize their comparative and complementary returns.
Treating drinking water with chlorine could prevent significant child deaths in low- and middle-income countries, but these benefits depend on reliable verification that chlorination is happening. Manual testing is costly and vulnerable to misreporting, while existing automated sensors are often too fragile for rural settings. We are designing a pull mechanism to incentivize the development and deployment of low-cost, robust chlorine sensors.
Climate change is expected to significantly reduce crop yields, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. To help reduce these negative effects, we are designing a pull mechanism that will incentivize research and development on and scale-up of heat-resilient crops in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Cement is one of the world’s most carbon intensive materials. We are exploring ways to incorporate the social cost of carbon into public cement production, thereby helping to correct the market failure that cement producers and purchasers do not fully internalize the social costs of the pollution they create.
Early research suggests that vaccines might be able to reduce enteric methane – methane emitted by ruminant animals such as cows – by up to 20-30%. We are working to develop a mechanism to cost-effectively incentivize private firms to invest in developing these solutions.
Greenhouse gas removal is a classic public good–the benefits accrue to the whole world. We are exploring using a variety of pull mechanisms–such as auctioned put options and procurement auctions–to bring the price down to a level where they can be deployed at scale.