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Doctors Without Borders Urges Danaher, Cepheid to Further Reduce Price of TB Tests

NEW YORK – Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) on Thursday sent an open letter to Danaher and its subsidiary Cepheid calling for a lower price for Cepheid's Xpert MTB/RIF Ultra tuberculosis test.

After a campaign from the organization to convince the companies to lower the price of the test to $5.00 to increase access to the test, Danaher last year announced that it would provide the test at cost for $7.97 to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria and to less-developed countries eligible for Cepheid's Global Access Program.

Danaher also agreed to validate the actual cost of the test with an internationally accredited third-party assessment and adjust its pricing if necessary, but the MSF said in its letter Thursday that Danaher has "made no headway on the audit you committed to, compounded by the failure to reduce the price of other priority test cartridges, such as that for extensively drug-resistant (XDR) TB, HIV, hepatitis, Ebola, and sexually transmitted infections, for which expansion of access continues to be urgent."

The letter also noted that the MSF Access Campaign's efforts to discuss GeneXpert's affordability barriers and the methodology for the audit have not been successful due to a lack of response from Danaher and Cepheid regarding multiple meeting offers. In addition, letters of appeal from the health ministries of seven countries requesting a reduction in the price of GeneXpert tests remain unanswered, MSF said.

The letter provides the signatures of more than 200,000 people who have endorsed the campaign's "Time for $5" petition, including healthcare workers, policy advocates, researchers, scientists, and company shareholders. MSF requested a written response by Oct. 25, 2024, that provides concrete plans to meet their demands.

In a separate statement, Mihir Mankad, director of global health advocacy and policy at MSF USA, said, "Our research shows that Danaher and Cepheid could charge $5 per test and still make a reasonable profit, so it's inexcusable that they are still charging more than triple that price in even the poorest countries for most of the tests they produce."

Cepheid's Xpert MTB/RIF Ultra is a real-time PCR assay that runs on the company's GeneXpert family of systems and simultaneously detects Mycobacterium tuberculosis and rifampicin resistance from patient samples.