LAUSR

Improving access to quality medicines is essential to achieve the sustainable development goals and universal health coverage.1 Over the past two decades, the global health community has invested to accelerate access to medicines for the world’s poorest people through increasingly sophisticated mechanisms. Fuelled by new public, private and philanthropic resources, these investments have yielded important results.2 However, with poverty projected to increase, including due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and fewer countries eligible for aid (as they become middleincome countries),3 a stronger link between what patients and countries need and can pay for, and what medicines donors and companies develop and supply, will be particularly important in optimizing access to medicines.