Summary
Bend Biomedical is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit global health pharmaceutical company. We deliver high-quality, low-cost medicines to prevent and cure serious diseases in neglected populations around the world.
What We Do
We specialize in critical preventive medicines in short supply and improved drug products for community-based mass drug administration. These medicines are on the World Health Organization Essential Medicines List and World Health Organization Essential Medicines List for Children.
We provide our medicines below-cost or completely free to governments and non-governmental organizations serving neglected populations. Our business model allows these products to be funded primarily through grants and charitable contributions.
We use appropriate dosage forms, optimal packaging, and labels and instructions in the local language when requested. This practice increases compliance and improves outcomes. The impoverished sick and susceptible deserve quality medicine in child-resistant, tamper-evident, environmentally-friendly packaging that they can read.
Definitions
Critical preventive medicines can prevent the occurrence of a serious disease or halt a serious disease and avert resulting complications after its onset.
Mass drug administration is treatment or preventive medicine administered to every member of a defined population (except those for whom the medicine is contraindicated) usually annually or biannually until the disease is no longer endemic.
Neglected populations defined here are peoples living in poor socio-economic conditions where efforts to eliminate preventable or curable diseases do not exist or are not working.
What is your first project?
Diethylcarbamazine, Ivermectin, and Albendazole comprise our first project for three reasons. First, these drugs prevent or cure lymphatic filariasis. Second, our contract manufacturing organization (CMO) is in India, where over 20 million people currently have lymphatic filariasis. Finally, the three medicines used to treat lymphatic filariasis can be packaged to individually treat onchocerciasis, soil-transmitted helminths, and tropical pulmonary eosinophilia.
Although we are starting with these three drugs, overall we are targeting some of the most prevalent diseases affecting communities in the regions of Africa, Central America, South America, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Over one billion people in these regions are afflicted by one or more of our targeted diseases, with children being disproportionately affected.
The total cost for this first project is $5,817,349.47 for 150,000,000 blister-packaged tablets. We are using both tech transfer and site transfer by our CMO so that batches of our products can be made at other manufacturers after our drug development.