Tari Suprapto
PhD, Assistant Director, Office of Technology Transfer, Rockefeller University, New York, N.Y., U.S.A.

The Global Forum for Health Research (www.globalforumhealth.org) recently published a two volume report titled Global Forum Update on Research for Health 2005. In summary this report showed that there is a disparity in the research effort to improve healthcare between developed and developing countries. For example there is high research effort in both rich and poor countries for diseases that affect large populations such as Hepatitis B and diabetes but there is a low research effort for diseases that primarily affect poor countries such as HIV AIDS and tuberculosis. There is also a group of neglected diseases that exclusively affect people in poor countries such as malaria Chagas disease and leishmaniasis and until very recently very little research is focused on finding cures for such neglected diseases.