In addition to the app, you may also raise your virtual hand to address your questions verbally. For participants joining via phone, to raise your hand, use star nine on your phone's dial pad. When you then get selected to ask your questions, please follow the instructions from the phone and press star six to unmute yourself. During the Q&A session, we will start a short feedback questionnaire. It will appear on your screens as a pop-up window and includes some single and multiple-choice questions. We would highly appreciate if you could complete this survey. One last remark. If you would like to follow the presented slides on your end as well, please feel free to go to roche.com/investors to download the presentation. At this time, it's my pleasure to introduce you to Bruno Eschli, Head of Investor Relations. Bruno, the stage is yours.
Thanks a lot, Henrik, and welcome to our first ESG event, focusing on access to healthcare. From our perspective, the most relevant ESG topic for a healthcare company. We really believe we can make the biggest impact and contribution to society. We hope that together with our subject matter experts, we have put together an interesting event today covering many different aspects. Regarding the agenda, we will have a quick overview on ESG at Roche, which will be done by Pascale Schmidt, our Chief Compliance and Sustainability Officer, before we will divide into the access topic. The access topic we have split 50-50 between Dia and Pharma, and Dia is here to come first, represented by Thomas Schinecker, our CEO Diagnostics, and by Stefan Seliger, our Head Global Access and Policy for Diagnostics.
When it comes to diagnostics, I think when it comes to broadening the access to healthcare, I think the role of diagnostics cannot really be overestimated, especially when you consider the health economics investments you have to do versus the benefits you can generate for a broad patient population around the globe. The second part will be covered by Michael Oberreiter, our Head of Global Access for the Pharmaceutical Solutions division. He will talk about our overall access strategy, including pricing, and take you through the challenges and opportunities when bringing highly innovative medicines, as they are in our portfolio, also including many rare and orphan diseases to patients around the world. I think it's also important to keep in mind there are several takeaways which are true for both divisions.
We strongly believe that innovation is a major part of our global access solution, and also that access is not a topic specific to just one geography, but rather that every country, whether it's a low- and middle-income country or a high-income country, faces its own very special challenges. Next slide, please. This slide summarizes our ambitions for both divisions, and I wanted to highlight again some of the underlying building blocks on how we want to deliver. If we look on the left side, on the Pharma side, you see we have two ambitions here. We have the 2030 ambition, which is double medical advances at less cost to society by 2030. This ambition initially presented by our Pharma CEO, Bill Anderson, in 2020. The underlying building blocks are here to double medical advances.
We have already done some work on this one by relocating resources into R&D. The second part is improve other patient benefits. This is by innovating more holistic solutions around our medicines, for example, disease management through digital tools. Then the third part is here, focusing on earlier, more targeted and shorter interventions, which should also bring some relief on the overall costs of the treatments. Then if you look here, today, we highlight a second ambition on the Pharma side, which is basically double patient access in the low- and middle-income countries, for all innovative medicines. This we want to achieve by 2026, and this is the topic I think which will be covered by Michael later in more detail in his section. Then if you look on the right side, this is the Dia side.
Here we also have a 2030 access goal out, which says double patient access to novel high medical value diagnostics by 2030. There are two elements contributing, and I think Thomas will cover this in more detail. The one element coming to play is again to accelerate innovation, and the other one is reduced time to reimbursement. With that, I would like to hand over to Pascale Schmidt, our Chief Compliance and Sustainability Officer, just to give a quick intro on ESG at Roche. Pascale, please.
Thank you, Bruno. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, all. Delighted to be with you here today. Bruno , you alluded to it. Next slide, please. The divisional ambitions you just mentioned, and which will be presented in more detail by Thomas , Stefan, and Michael, directly link to our approach to sustainability, starting with the reason why sustainability specifically matters to Roche. Our purpose is doing now what patients need next. How we identify and meet those needs, what we do every day, must be sustainable if we are to succeed. It's why sustainability is built into our business strategy and is part of everyone's job at Roche. We drive the execution of the company's sustainability agenda in strong alignment with the business strategy, and our approach is holistic and integrates the three dimensions of sustainability. The environment, how we minimize our impact on nature.
The economy, how we invest in medical advances, create jobs, and ensure livelihoods. The society, how we contribute to a better tomorrow for all. We want to deliver value to all stakeholders, and our approach reflects the topics that are of high relevance to our stakeholders, as assessed by an integrated and exhaustive materiality assessment we conducted in 2018, 2019, with more than 600 external and internal stakeholders and 30 experts. It has been enhanced since then by a continuous stakeholder dialogue confirming the most important contribution where Roche can make a difference. What is our unique contribution? On the left side, you see that on the environmental dimension, which is under high scrutiny also by the investor community.
We have had great achievements so far, but we set ourselves an ambitious goal and want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions for scope one and two to real zero by 2050, and not net zero in contrast to other corporations. It means that we don't want to revert back to CO₂ reduction certificates, but effectively emit less and less CO₂. If you go to the right-hand side, even though environmental sustainability is a must for corporation, however, as a global healthcare company, our greatest contribution to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals is goal three, which promotes healthy lives and well-being for everyone, everywhere. Roche's work to provide better global access to quality essential medicines and diagnostics supports this goal. Our real differentiator lies in innovation to achieve more medical progress at lower cost, notably through digitalization.
Our investment in R&D exceeds that of any other healthcare company worldwide, also in 2021, and this results in 14 new molecular entities in late stage and significant launches in diagnostics. If you go to the next slide, you see that the embeddedness of sustainability into our business strategy is also reflected by a strong involvement from all business areas and senior management in the sustainability governance structure. Sustainability is connected to the highest executive and non-executive committees, with a Corporate Governance and Sustainability Committee being responsible and accountable for governing sustainability at the Board of Directors level. The Corporate Executive Committee being responsible and accountable for the strategy and appointing the members of the Corporate Sustainability Steering Committee to whom it has delegated the responsibility for establishing, managing, and coordinating the implementation of the sustainability strategy.
The Sustainability Operations Committee implements the sustainability agenda, monitors and reports progress towards the goals. It works in agile ways in cross-functional working groups and throughout the global sustainability network made of affiliates, global functions, external experts and advisors, but also our communities of interest are grassroots organizations. If you go to the next slide, please. We are committed to transparency to improve our business and provide accurate information to our stakeholders. On the improving our business side, Roche's non-financial reporting is directed by the Corporate Sustainability Committee and is assured by PricewaterhouseCoopers. The data and information collected serves as a guide for reviewing and adjusting the sustainability strategy. Because we firmly believe that transparent reporting helps us improve our business, we have had a centralized repository for non-financial data since 2014.
This allows us to provide accurate information to our stakeholders, notably through our annual report or on our Roche.com site, but also adhering to a number of different standards and frameworks such as GRI and the UN Global Compact reports enable us to provide clear and balanced information to our stakeholders. In 2022, we will also join the Science Based Targets initiative. Whereas we have always been confident in our scope one and two activities and had science-based targets in place for many years, joining the Science Based Targets initiative allows us to simplify our message to our stakeholders, as well as integrate our scope three reduction plans into the business strategy. Last but not least, we also proactively contribute to the assessment by two rating agencies, mainly to serve us to benchmark ourselves and continuously improve our sustainability agenda.
DJSI helps us to assess our general sustainability framework and Access to Medicine Index our access strategy. Furthermore, if you go to the next slide, you see that we actively shape the corporate sustainability landscape through our contribution in biopharma and cross-industry initiatives and coalitions. If I may just highlight one that started recently, and that's the one in black. We are a member of the Health Systems Task Force from the Sustainable Markets Initiative. This one was launched in 2021 after COP26. The task force is composed of leaders in the healthcare industry, institutions, academia, NGOs, et cetera, who work together to accelerate the delivery of sustainable health care to improve individual, societal, and planetary health. Let's now look at what we have achieved already on the next slide. Our performance in 2021 across our three pillars illustrate a strong commitment to sustainability.
Let me just, though, highlight some figures on the social dimension, which is the focus of today's presentation. 16.4 million patients treated with Roche medicines in 2021. 27 billion tests conducted with Roche Diagnostics products, and 80 new molecular entities in clinical development. To conclude, we have all ESG dimensions covered in our sustainability framework. Today, we want to focus on the access component of the social pillar. As highlighted in the introduction, it is our greatest contribution to society. With this, I thank you for your attention and pass the word to Thomas. Thomas, the floor is yours.
Thank you very much, Pascale, and welcome also from my side. As Pascale mentioned, sustainability is strongly ingrained in our culture and our history, also through the founders of Roche. I truly believe that it is a competitive advantage of our organization. One dimension of sustainability is the impact that we're having on patients worldwide. Access is really the foundation of our strategy and to achieve this. Improving outcomes at reduced cost of care is we are only able to do that if patients actually have access to our products. Now let me start on the next slide to give you a bit more of an external market perspective. The needs from the healthcare systems and patients are changing. Healthcare systems across the globe are facing significant challenges to meet the needs of an aging population.
They're challenged by the fragmentation and inefficiencies in the system and when you need to scale, if you scale something that's inefficient, that makes things oftentimes even worse. How can they counter that and still improve outcomes of patients, while at the same time reduce cost of care? At the same time, we see that data exists in many different pockets of the system, but they cannot be linked to each other and therefore cannot be used to help for better decision-making. We see that patient engagement is increasing and there's a trend towards decentralization with home testing, telehealth solutions, et cetera. We also see a strong trend towards centralization to decrease the cost in the system. There's also an increasing role of public-private partnerships to deliver better healthcare.
We consider this collaboration and the role of the private sector as crucial to increase access worldwide and especially for those that are most in need. With increased expectations and on outcomes and strained budgets across the system, we also see an opportunity to shape health technology assessments to inform investment decisions. I particularly think that diagnostics, again, can play an important role. Through earlier diagnosis to patient stratification, we can actually use diagnostics also to reduce the costs in other parts of the healthcare system. Digitalization also has the potential to change healthcare dramatically. Yet what we see is that the regulatory environment around data protection is evolving and vary across markets. This impacts the availability and adoption of digital solutions across the world. Lastly, I would say that pandemic acted really as a catalyst for many of trends.
It really accelerated some of the changes in how we deliver healthcare to patients, also with more focus on preventive measures and remote care. Now let's quickly look at our strategy on the next slide. To address those needs of the healthcare system, we have built our strategy really around three pillars. The first is to deliver medical value on integrated testing solutions. This actually means bringing new markers on our fully automated platforms, thereby improving outcomes and reduced cost of care. Basically, full automation and visualization of the lab, helping more you know cost-efficient solutions, but also better quality in decision-making through that. At the same time, introducing new markers with which you can stratify patients earlier and you can detect diseases earlier, and with that, have better treatment options as well.
The second pillar is really enabling better and more confident healthcare decisions. This becomes more important as it is more difficult for physicians to navigate through the wealth of all this medical knowledge. Combining all the data is already a big advantage because today, the medical doctors don't even have access to all of the data when they need to make decision. Leveraging, you know, AI to then support them in the decision-making is the next step. Lastly, we want to improve care along the patient journey and provide true disease management solutions. These are important to tackle the fragmentation and inefficiencies of healthcare. We believe that there is a lot of opportunity to reduce all the waste in the system and so that you can actually invest into the patients.
In fact, we are investing very heavily into these priorities. Over the last three years, we've increased R&D investment by CHF 500 million, and with that, we're by far the company that spends the most money in innovation. We have a lot of exciting innovation coming to the market in the next couple of years that exactly address the pain points in the system. Beyond that, the basis are areas like access. These are important to accelerate innovation and make sure that diagnostics is available to more people worldwide. Why is it important? It's important because science without access is just science fiction, and it doesn't really help. Access is at the core of our strategy and of our 10-year ambition in diagnostics, which is then to double patient access to novel high medical value solutions.
We measure the ambition in two dimensions. One is accelerating innovation by bringing novel solutions to market, 75 novel solutions by 2030. Now, we differentiated, you know, in our innovation pipeline, really, the products that are just a development opportunity versus true innovation. Here we're talking about true innovation, bringing something to market that no one else has in the industry. The second piece is to reduce time from launch of the product to time of the reimbursement by half, which is critical so that people have faster access to this innovation, and we have a couple of examples in Stefan's section around that. Now on the next slide, you see that our strategy really covers the entire patient journey.
Really, in order to improve outcomes and reduce cost of care, healthcare systems need to develop more patient-centric approaches. They need to try to optimize interventions along the patient journey and get rid of fragmentation and inefficiencies. Here the interplay between diagnostics, pharma, and also our investments into digitalization insights. With that, we are really uniquely positioned in the industry because the interplay of these three disciplines will merge over time, and with that, provide better patient care for people around the world. In fact, this is what we see from our customers more and more in the future, where they would like us to help them solve their issues they have in the system. You can only do that when you have actually the three pillars under one roof.
Now, whether it's cancer, heart disease, infectious diseases or other health threats, prevention and early detection are actually really key. You know, every treatment always starts with a diagnosis. They really all depend on high-quality diagnostics. Again, the earlier you do it, the earlier you recognize a disease, the higher the chances are for the patients. Overall, diagnostic tests and medicines will continue to increase in use. Also, given the significant unmet needs in several disease areas. In fact, there are some where it's still a situation that you cannot detect the disease yet or it's too late or it's through an invasive method. With diagnostics, we can really change the game here. I think Alzheimer's is one, but also areas in women's health like endometriosis is another great example for that.
We believe that with our strategy, we're really best positioned to address those challenges. Where we have gaps and we cannot fill it in-house, we also will create strategic partnerships. Now, on the next slide, you see that with our strategy, we also target the major disease areas to reduce impact on patients and the economy. Now, the ones that I just mentioned, cardiovascular disease, infectious disease, cancer and neurological disorders together account for approximately 50 million deaths every year. Now, there is approximately a CHF 2 trillion impact on the economy through these diseases. Now, this is very, very conservative. Likely, the impact is even significantly higher. And in fact, you know, throughout the pandemic, it is likely that alone infectious diseases contributed to more than CHF 2 trillion economic impact in this time period.
Now, let me shift on the next slide to those disease burdens and really look at, you know, the impacts that we're having around the world. First, that's honestly shocking is that almost half the world's population have little or no access to diagnostics. There's huge opportunity to improve healthcare around the world. More than 300,000 women every year die of cervical cancer. This disease is highly preventable. In fact, the majority of these 300,000 deaths a year happen in low and middle-income countries. By screening these women earlier, every one of these women can survive. The same applies for tuberculosis-related deaths. About 2 billion, so one in three to one in four people in the world have latent tuberculosis, and 95% of these deaths are actually in the low-income.
There are people living with HIV. 2/3 of those people are in Africa, and majority of those are actually being tested and monitored on our solutions. Now, at Roche Diagnostics, we're addressing those challenges with very dedicated solutions. Now, to give you a couple of insights. Over 90 of our tests fall into the categories of the WHO list of essential diagnostics. We've sold 240,000 point-of-care separation cards in 2021, which helps detect or get samples in the most rural areas in Africa to a centralized machine where they can be then tested at a very high level.
We see that the demand for these cards are very high because to have point-of-care systems everywhere is not always the most cost-effective solution, and at times also from a temperature perspective, more problematic. More than 8 million people in Africa are using Roche tests to manage their HIV viral load. We believe these are some impressive numbers really highlighting our efforts. I would say also a recent example that I can add is our partnership with The Global Fund to support low and middle-income countries in strengthening their diagnostics infrastructure. Stefan will actually give you more examples later. Let me also talk about COVID-19 and our contribution to the fight against this pandemic because I think it's also a story of access.
Since the pandemic, you know, until end of Q1, we've had more than 1.5 billion COVID tests done on our systems. You know, this was only possible because we were very quick to market and we provided very high-quality solutions. Let me just give you a couple examples. We were the first company to have a SARS-CoV-2 detection test only days after the sequence was known back in January 2020. The PCR test running on the high throughput solutions was the first fully IVD and FDA approved test, which was launched days before WHO actually recognized this as a pandemic. Also, when you look at our antibody tests, they are now widely recognized in all the studies as being best in class. The nucleocapsid and the spike antibody test.
When it comes to rapid antigen, looking at the Cochrane studies and other meta-analysis, we show that our performance is also best in class here. We were not only fast, but, you know, the quality is also there. One of the ways you can see that is that also, you know, we didn't have to change the sequence or anything during this time. What's also important is being a responsible and ethical player in the market. We said we will have a responsible pricing strategy from the beginning. Basically, pricing similar to pre-pandemic times. This was important because we said cost should not be a barrier to access. When it comes to pandemic, Roche, you know, needs to do their part to help the world.
Since the pandemic, we've also more and more extended our platforms into all kinds of different markets, and we've also launched a lower throughput solution in the molecular side, so really enabling access to parts of the world that before didn't have that much access. Now let me give you an example of the impact of COVID-19 testing, and you see that on the next slide regarding Germany. Studies conducted in Germany show that PCR rapid antigen testing reduced the negative impact of the pandemic on the economy and also the healthcare system. In the study, it was shown that this meant about 3 million fewer infections and 62,000 fewer deaths. On the economic side, this reduced the cost in the healthcare system by about EUR 3 billion and prevented a EUR 36 billion decrease in the German GDP.
Now, this is a real good example to show that investing into diagnostics in the pandemic was the right thing to do and actually helped reduce the burden in the system. Let me finalize with one slide around global emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. This is just a selection of viruses that are existing around the world and that could emerge also more globally. Now, most of these infections occur in low- and middle-income countries, really with limited access to diagnostics. It is clear to us that we need to be even better prepared for the next pandemic. The next pandemic may not even come from a virus, but may come from a bacteria. This is why we're also working with the Fraunhofer Institute, where we established an epidemic preparedness program.
We've been actively working on being prepared for pandemics even prior to this pandemic, and this is also why we were able to react so quickly. Now, we'll continue with this approach, and we'll closely monitor all the pathogens listed here and many more, and we'll be ready to step up in our role as a global corporate citizen when we're needed also in the future. With that, I thank you, and I would like to hand over to Stefan Seliger, our Head of Global Access and Public Policy.
Thank you, Thomas. Warm welcome also from my side. I'm very excited to share with you some more details, how we think about our ambition to create more access to the diagnostic solutions that we have, so more patients can benefit from it. Let me jump straight to the first slide, which I want to use mainly to ground ourselves in the reality that affects whether and how fast a novel diagnostic test will actually be reimbursed by local healthcare systems. With the healthcare landscape and the trends that Thomas had laid out earlier, we see clear opportunities, but also some barriers that we want to address when we think about accelerating patient access down the line.
This slide shows a few of them that we're addressing in our product development, in our commercialization strategies, but also in our policy work, and that also extend down to the country level. Despite the impact that in vitro diagnostics have had on clinical decision-making, there's oftentimes no structured and timely reimbursement mechanism and pathway in place that ensures that reimbursement comes straight after the market authorization of a novel diagnostic test. This is a key difference that we see compared to pharmaceuticals, for instance. Our ambition is to ensure that our solutions can reach as many patients as soon as possible after market authorization. That means coordinating all the efforts early on to accelerate coverage decisions and adoption right after the product obtains marketing authorization in the countries. On the next slide, please.
As Thomas mentioned, Roche is an integrated healthcare company, and with that, we're in a unique position to really ensure that patients and healthcare systems can benefit from our innovative diagnostic solutions along the entire patient journey, and we have the therapeutics in some instances as well to support that. Our broad diagnostics portfolio allows us to provide solutions in all disease areas along the patient journey, from screening all the way down to monitoring of disease progression. Over the years, we have gained broad experience in ensuring access to our diagnostic solutions around the globe. COVID was just one example that Thomas just highlighted.
Although the product development process is centralized to guarantee quality and safety standards at the global level, access is by nature a local issue, and we should always consider in our global strategies the needs in the local markets in order to succeed. Therefore, we have many access activities going on at any given time between global, regional, and local teams to ensure we're addressing these hurdles that exist at the market level. Today, I want to highlight four examples which serve to illustrate our experience in this space and the learnings and that we have gained in addressing some of the barriers and opportunities that exist. We start on the patient journey on the left-hand side of your slide with an example of cervical cancer screening before we move down the journey to a preeclampsia example, then a biomarker-driven lung cancer management example.
Lastly, I want to touch on our Global Access Program a bit more, and it was mentioned before, for instance, a Plasma Separation Card in HIV monitoring. These are four distinct areas that highlight how we are thinking about access along the patient journey. On the next slide, please. Let's start with cervical cancer. This is really one of our priority areas. As you know, the WHO has a goal that by 2030 we are trying to eradicate cervical cancer. We are very much behind this goal, and it is a priority for us as well. The majority of the cases of cervical cancer are actually caused by infection with a human papillomavirus. In fact, in 2020 alone, there were over 600,000 new diagnosed cases of cervical cancer around the globe.
That is more than one per minute. Despite the fact, as Thomas said, that this disease is really preventable through early screening, more than half of the women still die unnecessarily of this disease. While the conventional Pap smear and the pathology that follows have been the primary method of choice for clinicians, still one-third of those women presenting with locally advanced cervical cancer did in fact have appropriate Pap screening prior to diagnosis, showing the low accuracy of this exam. At the same time, many women are lost to follow-up after Pap smears, and with this, the mortality is expected to continue to grow. While the incidence is disproportionately high in low- and middle-income countries, 10%-16% of cases are still affecting women in high-income countries.
It's really important, and we are very passionate about bringing new and effective molecular screening solutions to patients around the globe to help detect the disease early and allow initiation of curative treatments. We have all tools needed to support the WHO goal of eliminating cervical cancer. The question is just how do we partner with governments, with associations, NGOs, and even patient organizations to implement women's screening programs using HPV molecular testing and increase awareness and capacity for those that are diagnosed to find the right treatment no matter where they may live. Next slide, please. Our contribution to the elimination of cervical cancer in the world goes beyond primary molecular testing. Roche is the only company that offers the entire spectrum of self-sampling, screening, triage, and digital solutions that provide biological insights to guide clinicians as well as women along each step.
I would like to zoom into HPV viral DNA screening and talk a little bit about the Australian team and what they have done to enable access to this very critical first step in the patient journey. On the next slide. Roche in Australia has supported an ongoing trial, the Compass trial, that is generating clinical evidence as well as local health economic evidence. This data was used to engage local thought leaders on the benefit and of a confirmatory early diagnosis of molecular testing programs, which resulted in the implementation of a comprehensive national cervical cancer program by the end of 2017. With this, Australia is on track to be the first country in the world to eliminate cervical cancer in its population. Commercially, what did it mean for us?
It meant that we established ourselves as a leader in HPV molecular testing, and we managed to increase our sales fourteen-fold in the subsequent years. The timely evidence generation, including the analytical, clinical, and local health economic evidence, were really the key drivers to ensure access and then subsequently the adoption locally. On the next slide, I would love to touch on one element that, is also very important in this context. When we think about evidence generation, it is increasingly important to think about evidence generation strategies across diverse populations. Addressing barriers to clinical trial participation, for instance, is key in ensuring broad patient benefit as well as access down the line.
Across Roche, whether we are on the Dia side or on the pharma side, we are innovating to bring studies to traditionally underserved patient populations to broaden clinical trial access, diversify clinical data, and accelerate scientific discovery. Being able to demonstrate the value for diverse populations for enrollment across geographies and populations is more important than ever to inform local payer and coverage decisions. Both pharma and Dia demonstrate this commitment, as shown in some of the examples shown here on the right. As an example, today 51% of our patients in infectious disease clinical trials are recruited from populations that have traditionally been understudied. Next slide, please. I would like to stay in women's health for one more example, and let's talk about preeclampsia, where appropriate use of in vitro diagnostics can really make a significant difference for both the patient as well as healthcare systems.
A confirmed preeclampsia diagnosis is critical because the disease itself comes with severe complications that affect about 3%-5% of all pregnancies. It's in fact the number two leading cause of maternal deaths, representing about 14% of all maternal deaths. This condition is associated typically with high blood pressure and the presence of increased levels of protein in the urine and poses severe health issues for both mother and baby and is associated with extensive hospitalization costs. Diagnosis for many patients presenting with suspected preeclampsia fails because many pregnancy care programs don't even cover routine testing for known biomarkers in women at risk of developing the disease.
Clinical management of the condition is very difficult, and a very quick decision needs to be taken, and therefore, oftentimes, immediate hospitalization and close monitoring is the first choice for a clinician being presented with a suspected case of preeclampsia. This can translate into unnecessary hospitalization without confirmatory diagnosis. Roche has a test, the Elecsys sFlt-1/PlGF ratio test, which can actually rule out preeclampsia with a very high negative predictive value of nearly 100% for the following seven days. You can imagine what that means. You can immediately separate a suspected preeclampsia patient that needs to be hospitalized and monitored versus someone that is at a very low risk of developing actual preeclampsia. On the next slide, I want to show what this looks like in the U.K.
In the U.K., Roche funded and partnered with local providers on the INSPIRE trial that yielded published health economics data and risk stratification data to support wider adoption of preeclampsia routine testing. Just last month, based on the cost-effectiveness data, NICE formally recommended routine preeclampsia testing for better patient outcomes, reduced cost of care, and optimized resourcing at the NHS. Cost-effectiveness data have shown on average, the healthcare system saves around GBP 344 per patient, which translates to a net savings of GBP 24 million per year in the U.K. This impact is not limited just to the U.K. On the next slide, you see that similar health economics studies have shown that the medical and economic potential of routine biomarker testing to rule out preeclampsia can be universally realized in different healthcare systems.
Of course, dependent on their local cost for typical hospitalization, the amount that can be realized differs. The estimated impact, if you can just imagine this being implemented worldwide, is well above $1 billion a year. On the next slide, I would like to move into lung cancer. We all know that much progress has been made in the development of targeted treatments for lung cancer, with Roche contributing several therapeutic products to today's treatment. Molecular-targeted therapies all rely on the use of testing for mutations in the target gene to inform which therapy may yield the best outcome for the patients while avoiding less effective therapies and associated costs and time. Next slide. Adoption of these targeted therapies requires the inclusion of mutation testing in guidelines and the reimbursement by the system.
In Chile, the existing reimbursement for IHC tests, for a regular IHC test, did not fully capture the value of the information that this test would yield. By generating local health economic models and the partnership with local therapeutic experts, testing guidelines incorporated the new evidence, and a dedicated higher reimbursement rate was created. Creating access to companion diagnostics is often unbuilt from the availability of the therapeutic option. In this case, it took five years to actually achieve a value-based reimbursement for the combination of the two. Syncing up the timing of the marketing authorization and reimbursement of the diagnostic solution on the one hand with that of the therapeutic requires alignment between diagnostics and pharma strategies early on.
With a growing portfolio of the integrated solutions, Roche really takes advantage of having both diagnostics and pharma capabilities under one roof. I want to switch gears now to the monitoring side of the patient journey on the next slide. I want to talk about, quickly about the Global Access Program. This program started in 2014 to provide affordable access solutions for HIV viral load testing in Africa and has since expanded to other infectious diseases such as hepatitis B and C, tuberculosis, cervical cancer, and most recently, COVID. This program now includes 89 low and middle-income countries today. Thomas already mentioned the plasma separation card, which allows self-testing in remote areas, which has been a great success to ensure access in rural areas.
The addition of iThemba app allowed patients to receive their results remotely on their mobile phones and manage their disease also locally. Critical to the success of the Global Access Program have been these sustainable public-private partnerships with NGOs, because we also need to think about increasing capabilities and capacities locally to ensure that we ultimately have access. Thomas mentioned the Global Fund, so I will not go into that any further, and instead go to the next slide. This is another aspect of creating access, the capability building that needs to happen in order to create access to a broad portfolio. On the left-hand side, you see the typical basic laboratory, and then a laboratory from Zambia actually taken last month that invested into modern technology like a Cobas C800.
You can visualize already the difference that this machine could make in providing a whole portfolio of different testing solutions to the communities that they serve. In order to reach even more emerging markets, we're also tailoring our instrument development to meet the needs of the low- and middle-income countries. Like on the right-hand side, you see the emerging markets analyzer that provides a compact desktop capability for emerging markets in China with an expected launch in 2025. One of the aspects of this is that there will be significantly lower manufacturing costs associated with it, making it more available for low- and middle-income countries. Let me switch to the next slide and just highlight an aspect of the importance of good, sustainable partnerships in order to get to equitable access.
We have a number of partnerships that allow us to co-create the solutions that we need on the ground in order to have a sustained impact and ensure funding as capability building on the ground. On the next slide, I would like to shift gears and look into the future. While we had meaningful impact on the availability of diagnostic tests across the globe today, a lot more needs to be done to achieve truly equitable access. Remember the 47% that Thomas mentioned in the beginning, we have a long way to go. Our ambition is to double patient access, and we want to do by embedding prospectively the access requirements into our product and then commercialization strategies to achieve rapid, broad, and sustainable access for patients around the globe. In doing so, our ambition is to accelerate reimbursement coverage decisions, so go rapid.
We also want to make sure that take into account the needs of up to 23 different markets to ensure that our global strategies address any different markets possible and lay the foundation for scaling up in even more countries after that. Lastly, we want to make sure that the value of our solutions is recognized by healthcare systems and our customers, so we can fuel a sustainable pipeline of future innovation. On my last slide, I just want to sort of give you after a lot of information, just the key takeaways that, you know, access is central to our strategy here at Roche Diagnostics. We're building on our experience and the impact we have had across the globe and continue to invest in our growing internal capabilities as well as our external network.
Even more so, we are going to focus on integrating these access requirements into development and commercialization of our solutions portfolio. With that, I say thank you for your attention, and I will hand it over to my colleague from Pharma, Michael Oberreiter.
Thank you, Stefan, and also thanks for all the great work our diagnostics colleagues are doing, because the pharma strategy is really building on the successes of our diagnostics colleagues. What I would like you to join me now is on a little bit of tour de force over the next couple of minutes about the Roche's principal philosophies when we approach in pharma access and how we want to broaden the access. Also, how we actually translated the learnings from the past 2.5 years of the pandemic into very concrete actions on the ground. I want to share with you some very practical examples on behalf of the colleagues that are working in countries with the local stakeholders on the ground, and also briefly touch on the way we look at pricing and affordability in general. The next slide, please.
The access philosophies and strategies we are developing in pharma are actually grounded in the SDG goals, and they're particularly grounded in two of the so-called SDG target. In target 3.4, which has the aim to reduce the number of premature deaths due to NCDs by one-third by 2030. In SDG target 3.8, which is achieving universal health coverage, including financial protection. Universal health coverage basically means everyone should get the treatment he or she needs without suffering financial hardship. About two years and a couple of months ago, this historical UHC declaration was signed at the UN General Assembly.
If you look where we're standing now, we have to acknowledge that a lot of those countries who signed the declaration are suffering, and some of the achievements we have or the progress we made in the past 2.5 years is really at risk. Because the current situation looks like that Thomas said, half of the world's population doesn't have access to diagnostics, and this is perfectly true. But the situation is even more severe because half of the world's population do not have access to any quality basic healthcare solutions. We also do know without timely intervention, we are falling short of 18 million healthcare workers, frontline healthcare workers, doctors, GPs, oncologists, name it, by 2030. Majority of these healthcare workers will be missed out in the LMICs.
We also know that every year, still by now, over 100 million people are driven into poverty because they cannot afford the healthcare cost. Next slide, please. What we also have seen that actually COVID has brought new challenges, we thought or we had the experience with our external stakeholders, actually COVID has amplified and probably revealed the already existing ones. I will not repeat what Thomas already laid out beautifully, just highlight a couple of aspects which are very specific maybe to pharma. Number one is we're facing in upper middle and high income countries an increasing competition between budgets. There is a budget in the healthcare which is not gonna be expanded in many of those countries, and there's almost a type of competition between disease areas also bidding the investments.
While digital health offers a lot of opportunities, this is also money that needs to be invested to build infrastructure which will not be spent on treatments and medicines. We also know that due to COVID, actually we are facing a pandemic-related backlog of medical procedures. Yes, even in developed countries. Most of the countries either stopped screening programs for cancer or patients were too afraid to get a COVID infection when they would come to the hospital, so they did not show up at the hospital at all. On the more technical side, what we are facing, particularly in those healthcare systems that are more established, we are facing a situation that the current HTA systems and the way the value of innovation is assessed does not keep up with scientific progress.
If we would switch to the side of the low- and middle-income countries, the already existing lack of healthcare infrastructure and healthcare professionals has been clearly amplified. We're still facing a lot of low disease awareness and diagnosis, some cultural challenges, lack of regulatory processes there, general economic pressure, but one of the big barriers is also inadequate funding and basically a lack of even basic insurance system in those countries. The next slide, please. I really don't wanna paint a picture which is too dark. We also have seen a lot of progress and positive signals in the past 2.5 years, and I think it's gonna be our joint challenge that we need to keep those things that were really good and helped well and to further translate it into concrete actions.
What we're seeing in the upper middle-income countries is there are positive signals for further economic growth. See there's a rapidly growing middle class, and we also see really a more adoption of technology in those countries, which we also interestingly see an increasing adoption of telemedicine and telehealth among physicians, but also acceptance by patients in low- and middle-income countries. What we also do see, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, there's an increased country collaboration, where countries are more willing to share healthcare facilities to share the experience and thinking about creating joint data spaces to exchange healthcare information. What is also happening, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, is that the aging population is really driving the development of new healthcare services. The next one, please.
The way we as Roche thought about it, and when we thought about it actually with external stakeholders is, that we do know that UHC is really standing on three pillars. Those pillars are population coverage, it's health system coverage, and it's financial protections. We work together with local stakeholders on the ground to identify what we call our six brightest drivers of UHC, which are those six areas where we think with our expertise, with our knowledge, but also with our products, partner, and solutions, can make the biggest impact towards UHC. Number one is clearly in the access space around expanding the access to standard of care. Clear example that we...
That I'm happy to share with you is that we have currently over 3 million people on patient support programs and also the academic goal for access which I will highlight a little bit more to Kita later on. Second area where we think we could play a very important role is really in the innovation. As Pascale mentioned, we are the number one investor pharmaceutical research and development. One example would be the investments we are taking in expanding our portfolio around the COVID-19 pandemic, but we did not only expand our investment into research and development of treatments, we also expand our investment really in creating new knowledge and knowledge transfer systems to be better prepared. The third area where we're focusing on is on making an investment case for non-communicable diseases and rare diseases.
As Thomas mentioned, for a lot of countries, infectious diseases are still a major problem. There's no way we can achieve universal coverage when we continuously neglect, which is happening in a lot of those countries, NCDs and the rising number of rare diseases. Very practical examples I'm gonna share later would be what the work that we have done with external stakeholders around our both drugs Hemlibra in hemophilia and Evrysdi for SMA. Next one, please. Also an area where we think we have a lot of expertise and can contribute is system capacity. System capacity is really referring to the ability of systems to provide health services in the most efficient way. It aims to strengthen health resilience.
We're working together with external partners and our key projects here are with Project ECHO, which is a telementoring program, or our long-standing partnership with City Cancer Challenge, which aims at implementing local cancer care ecosystem at the city level. Projects that we have done or work that we have done on the product side to support system capacity and free up, let me just highlight one, that would be Phesgo. Phesgo is a fixed combination of two cancer drugs, and this fixed combination will be delivered in a vial. This vial is so easy to administer to patients that the preparation and administration lasts only five minutes and will be done in the hospital. Before we had the fixed-dose combination, what we have seen is that patients had to spend 2.5 hours.
What Phesgo is actually doing on the one hand, it's very convenient for patients because they don't have to spend 2.5 hours in an infusion chair. On the other hand, it really helps to free up those urgently needed capacities, particularly in the chemotherapy units of a lot of hospitals. The fifth area or the fifth key driver of our progress drivers is really around digital and personalized care. We think that by applying technology, we can help to close the care gap. We are also very aware that digital has the power to either be the great unifier or being the great divider. Our approach when we develop digital tools also that we quite early collaborate with people in the natural settings where they would then apply the technology.
One example would be the Floodlight app, which helps patients with MS to monitor the progress of their disease, and they can share the data with the doctor and make together informed treatment decisions. Finally, the number six area that we're focusing on, the key driver would be really the element sustainable funding and financing solutions. If you look at our access strategies, you don't always find all six of those key drivers addressed because it highly depends on what is needed locally and what is in the local ecosystem. You will always find a combination of the six drivers. Next one, please. Okay, thank you. We decided to build out, particularly for every, an ambitious yet achievable goal.
As I mentioned, this goal is really directed towards improving access to our innovative core products in the areas of oncology, neuroscience, rare diseases and immunology. It is also really directed towards supporting the SDG target of reducing the number of premature deaths in NCDs. The goal is to double the number of patients in the LMICs by the end of 2026. The way we want to approach this is that we look really at these LMICs. When we speak about LMICs, we're using the World Bank classification, which is generally accepted. We're talking about 85 countries where 50% of the world population does reside, but they have also 45% of the world's poor in those countries, and they generate 30% of the global GDP.
Roche is not present in all of these 85 countries, but we do believe that we are present in those countries who present archetypes. Our clear ambition here is also to define solutions that are scalable and transferable from one setting into another setting, into another country. The next one, please. The way how we approach this goal to double the number of patients with access to our core therapy is that we really apply a very systematic approach around the patient pathway and around the value chain. We're going to start with more inclusive clinical trial designs. Where we want to find a way to support health equity and diversity, and also by placing more clinical trials into those countries.
Because when we do that, number one, does it not only accelerate access for patient, it also really helps with local upskilling and scaling up of those initiatives. We're also working together with local stakeholders on in those countries where there is a regulatory and a reimbursement system, accelerating those processes because the gap are really dramatic. If you would compare the time for access and filing and reimbursement between a low-income country and between Europe, there's a gap that very quite often span years. And we really wanna also, of course, work in the area of affordability. We do believe that particularly in LMICs, there is an opportunity that those systems can leapfrog.
Because most of the highly developed countries are either financed by the Bismarck model or the Beveridge model, and we do think that for those LMICs countries, that they can find alternative way of funding and financing sources for their population health needs. We're also working in the space of capacity enablement, which is something where Stefan also touched upon, which is really about supporting local infrastructure with external partners, supporting knowledge transfer, supporting technology transfer. Finally, underlying all of this is really this huge element of partnerships. Finding the right partners, either on global, national or regional level, who take also ownership of these access projects. Because our fundamental belief is sustainability from an access perspective would mean that we as Roche act as a catalyst for those access projects.
there come the point in time where Roche will be no longer needed because if the solution work, it will be implemented by the system. What I really personally like very much about this is that this whole access goal is really focused on expanding local capabilities and creating solutions on the ground that fit locally, but it also will force us and does force us actually as Roche accelerate, adapt, and question our internal processes. Next one, please. A key element because it's on the LMICs, and we do know two facts. Number one, we do know that currently in LMICs, out-of-pocket financing is the number one source for healthcare financing. The number two facts we know is the only way to achieve sustainable universal health coverage is by the increased governmental investment and governmental funding.
The way we want to approach the big topic of funding and financing is that we gradually want to help systems and want to create solutions together with people from system to move from the bottom left corner from those countries who are predominantly out of pocket and out-of-pocket payments, which drives people into poverty, particularly in the disease areas where we are in, more towards hybrid private funding schemes with the goal in the end that we will end at government and compulsory health insurance schemes. We have some examples from previous project where we can demonstrate that we can do that. The challenge we are facing here with addressing sustainable healthcare financing elements is that we really there's no one-size-fits-all approach. We need a variety of multiple complementary funding solutions. The next one, please.
This is just a snapshot of the geographical and cultural overview and variety of the access challenges that we are facing. Allow me just to point out one. Because we also believe when we develop those access solutions, we need to put way more focus on the cultural context for redeveloping solutions than we did in the past. One example I really like is about New Zealand. In New Zealand, there's the indigenous population is roughly about 15% of New Zealand population with health outcomes that fall way behind the rest of the population. We basically have started a dialogue and found out that the problem or the challenge is here, that there's a fundamental belief, a cultural belief in the Māori population. They are highly interested in health innovation.
They wanna get genomic testing, but their belief is that no part of the body should or can leave New Zealand. Our solution was then that we hired actually a public health leader from the Māori community who does help us now engaging with the community and will help us to shape our local programs. We already had the first round of a genomic sequencing high stakeholder table to develop jointly with the community a solution that would work. Next one, please. This is now the area where we do a little deep dive into three projects for above-brand or product-agnostic access solutions. As I mentioned in the beginning, we are falling short of 80 million healthcare workers.
Particularly in LMICs, there is a huge gap in the trained healthcare workers, and also particularly in the areas where Roche is operating, where we need highly trained and skilled people. Project ECHO is a possible solution to addressing the healthcare gap. It is a telementoring program which works on a Zoom-like platform and does connect healthcare workers from all around the world or within the country. It is a collaborative model of medical education on the one hand, plus developing patient pathways and care management on the other hand. What it actually does is it can help to increase access to specialty treatment, particularly in rural and remote settings. It really engages clinicians and local partners on the ground in kind of a learning ecosystems around that. We have started the partnership in October 2020 in a couple of countries.
We are currently at eight countries where we do have some pilots with Echo, and I just wanna share one very concrete. In Indonesia, after setting the pilot for Echo in Indonesia, we sat together with the government of Indonesia and the Dharmais National Cancer Center. What we're also doing around Echo is that we are collecting data about the impact of the program. The government likes the program, find this highly applicable because in Indonesia, we're talking about five main islands and more than 6,000 islands where people are living. Healthcare capacity in the absence of public transport and getting patients to treatment is a huge issue.
The Indonesian government has now taken on Project ECHO as a core element, how they want to build up the healthcare infrastructure and committed to create a tele-mentoring network across all of Indonesia with 10 so-called hubs, which will be university clinics, and to work with over 100 so-called spokes, which are like satellites in very remote areas in Indonesia. This is all with the aim to improve on the one hand the quality of the treatment that is available, but also to raise medical education and close the gap of healthcare workers. Next one, please. If you look at the funding and financing challenges that we are facing, one example is the Cancer Health Fund in Nigeria. Nigeria is a country of 211 million people roughly, and 84% of the population in Nigeria fall in the category of highly vulnerable.
Medical insurance is almost not available, and if it's available it does not cover treatment for cancer care. What we did is, again, like Stefan said, the initial approach is engaging with the local system. Going into Nigeria, connect with local stakeholders. We create and led a private sector coalition under the cooperation with the World Bank, which resulted in establishment of the Nigerian Cancer Health Fund. What this fund is doing is that this Cancer Health Fund provides a basic funding of up to $5,000 for treatment in the three most common type of cancers in Nigeria, which is breast, cervical, and prostate. Roche had also signed a memorandum of understanding with this Cancer Health Fund to ensure we establish a cost-sharing model between the Cancer Health Fund and Roche.
The aim of this cost-sharing model is to reduce the percentage of out-of-pocket payment for the patient. Another very, very important element of this collaboration is that we could convince the government to establish quality criteria and quality management of existing providers to harmonize the quality standards for cancer care there. The impact is that since the creation of this fund about CHF 4 million have been already allocated, and about 400 people have received their care. I know looking at 400 people receiving care versus there's a population of 200 million people sounds very tiny and small, but this is quite often how those local access projects work. The cancer fund, again, it's scalable, it's transferable, it's replicable, and we continue this work. The next one, please. Empower Clinics in Kenya.
What Empower Clinics in Kenya are doing is they are tracing local infrastructure and capacity building needs through community centers. Kenya, 40 million people, 30 oncologists. Very few specialized hospital. People mostly tend to go to so-called medical community centers, which you would also find in other rural areas. We sat together, and this is a coalition of Roche. It's a coalition of the county's first ladies of Kenya and of the Kenya Cancer Association. We came together and created this idea of what, instead of creating specific treatment centers, we would embed low accessible screening centers into already existing medical centers. This was really sort of like the birth hour of the Empower Clinics. Since we started this project with Empower Clinics, we have already established 16 clinics all over the country.
In that time period, the good thing is those clinics are established within the local infrastructure where people would go anyway. Since the establishment of the Empower Clinics, over 25,000 people were screened. Over 10,000 women were screened for breast and cervical cancer, and 950 patients did receive treatment in those centers. The impact of this Empower Clinic, which is run and owned and hosted by locals for locals, goes beyond cancer care. In addition to cancer screenings, the doctor really told us, "Well, if the patient is around anywhere, why not screening for diabetes and hypertension?" The screening process and the screening portfolio that is offered will be continually expanded. What those clinics do is, those clinics scale up and train up marginalized women with disabilities as community healthcare workers, and they help and run those clinics.
The next one, please. Thank you. Now I would also switch a little bit here from like all the solutions I shared with you now, were really not at all product related. Where we are really also proud of is all the solutions, any other company that wants to join, it's completely open. We do not own Empower Clinics. We do not run Empower Clinics. We do not own the Cancer Health Fund. Everyone can join there. Let me focus a little bit briefly on some more product-specific solutions. One solution, what we did to enable and accelerate global access to innovative medicines during health emergency was really worked around Actemra and Ronapreve. What we actually did, we signed up quite early, research and development partnerships to accelerate drug development.
We also signed up manufacturing deals and made knowledge transfer to other manufacturers to scale up production capabilities. We had within a short period of time, more almost 1 million people treated with severe COVID treatments really treated with Actemra. In addition, we committed that we will deliver 2,050 doses to the WHO and XR partners to distribute, particularly in LMICs, and applied for the WHO list of pre-qualified medicines. We also dedicated all our largest manufacturing facilities, working with industry partners to maximize the production, overcome the global supply challenge because Actemra was originally not a COVID medicine. It was a medicine for rheumatoid arthritis. The challenge we faced here was also that there's a lot of people out there which were already on existing treatment. Next one, please.
Hemlibra in hemophilia is a good example for what is possible to enable global access to new standard of care if you collaborate at the right time with the right people early on. Number one, the benefit of Hemlibra is actually it gives more freedom to patients. It's an treatment for hemophilia. It requires a loading dose, initial loading dose around it, and then you can decide to the maintenance dose to give it once a week, every two weeks or every four weeks, which actually gives way more freedom to others. Hemlibra can be self-administered, which frees up resources.
What we did fairly early on is number one, link back to what Stefan said is together with patients and patient groups, we designed one of the largest clinical programs where we really looked at endpoints and the trial population that reflects the patients that really get the treatment. We started early on developing an integrated access strategy with a focus on access for all, specifically for the LMICs, which led us to collaborate with the World Federation of Hemophilia. We made partnerships around diagnosis, patient education and training of HCPs, and that made a collaboration with the World Federation of Hemophilia Humanitarian Aid Program, and achieved that we could reach 1,000 patients across 30 countries who have now access. What is really important here is it's the first time ever that patients in LMICs get prophylactic treatment for hemophilia.
We're going to build, and we're going to continue this partnership. Next one, please. I think this is the last product-related example. It's about the Evrysdi spinal muscular atrophy, where we used similar principles in Hemlibra, which is focusing on how can you achieve broad and rapid access. Number one is early partnerships with patient focused group, particularly with the SMA Foundation, that helped us to deliver at the time the broadest clinical development program for SMA. Again, very important early on generating the data that would allow to make conclusions about the applicability in the real world setting. We worked where it was possible with accelerated regulatory pathways to ensure that we have rapid submissions for pricing and for reimbursement. We put a lot of focus on two key access pillars, which were awareness and diagnosis, and offered also value-based pricing solutions.
We also still continue to partner with the SMA community to reach the rest of the patients. The next one. What we are doing is across all those initiatives, and that's just two instances, and this is sort of a new discipline. Since 2019, we're working with the Boston University to establish an evaluation framework. Which means basically, we do not want to start any new access program where we have not exactly clarity about what are the outcomes we want to achieve. Of course, experimenting how we're going to achieve them, but how do we measure what we achieve? We're going to look at what are the most cost-effective interventions that can be taken, what would be the right partners, and also what data is needed to convince the policymakers to take those programs on. Next one.
With that, I'm in the space of affordability and pricing and how we look at. For all our new product launches, we do not only launch a product with price, we always launch a product with affordability and financing solutions. We usually have those solutions in, like, four categories. Doesn't again mean that we use all the four categories in each and every country. It highly depends on the local situation. Those most common four solutions that we're offering are either finance-based solution, which are really aimed to address either budget uncertainty, or just, like, lack of ability to pay. One example would be what we did in Ivory Coast, where, instead of negotiating product per product, we made an innovative portfolio basket deal in combination with a public-private partnership to reduce the cost of care.
We're increasingly experimenting with performance-based solution, or you could say, pay per outcomes, which is a novel approach, but that only works in very sophisticated healthcare systems with a robust data generation model around it. But one example here would be really what the work that we did for Polivy in Spain. We also work a lot with patient support programs who are always designed and co-designed and co-created with the patients on the ground. As an underlying core element of all the pricing element is our approach towards international differential pricing. There is not one country that pays sort of like exactly the same price in another country.
We are factoring in GDP per capita, purchasing power, public health expenditure, and the human development index, with the aim to really develop an internationally differentiated pricing model that meets the need of the system. The next one, please. Our pricing approach is really rooted in the WHO definition of fair pricing. The WHO definition of fair pricing is that the price should be affordable for healthcare system of patients and at the same time generate incentives for the industry to invest in research and development. The dimension that we are really looking is when we're defining our prices is that we look first and foremost what is the health impact and the societal impact that a new intervention may bring in patients in the system. We also have to look at the system context, which is a country's ability to pay.
Plus, we have to look at are there already alternative treatments available. In fact, we have to look at the future innovation. This is our way how we want to try to combine or match innovation, affordability, and health impact. The last one, please. What we are actually quite aware of is that the value really lies in the eye of the beholder. We do not claim, and we do know that we do not own the definition of value. What we think, what we do own, and what we need to do with our accountability is that we need to raise the awareness for the different dimensions of value, the societal value, the patient health value, and the patient and caregiver value, and have a robust dialogue with all the stakeholders. Because we do believe it is critically important.
If you want to achieve universal health coverage, and if you want to achieve access to innovation broad around the world, there needs to be a mutual understanding of those definitions of value and what needs to be done to realize that value in the individual context of the countries we're operating in. Thank you. With that, I'm giving it back to Bruno.
Thanks, Michael, for these many insights, and thanks to all the speakers. I think there's a lot of topics we could touch upon, and we have several questions here. I will soon open the Q&A. I also want to make you aware that we have a poll starting now, which is 10 questions. We would very much appreciate if you could provide us here some feedback which then will be helpful for our future planning on also communicating our goals. I will pick a first question from here from the chat, and this goes maybe to Thomas. It's about diagnostics, and is there a target for the number of instruments in low-mid income countries by 2030 that coincides with the broader 2030 target of doubling the access?
There is also the mentioning here, overall, how should we judge the success of Roche? Where would you like to be in 2030 on the Access to Medicine Index? Ninth place is okay, but a long way behind Novartis. Maybe just a quick comment here from my side. I think, when you judge Roche here, I think you always have to take into account our special portfolio. If you have a portfolio which has a lot of rare disease medicines in there, like Michael pointed out, Hemlibra, Evrysdi, and SMA, I think you have a special situation. You have very, very small patient populations. There's global patient populations of only 30,000 people. I think this you have to take into account when you want to benchmark. Benchmarking is not so straightforward.
On the machine placements, Thomas, over to you.
Yeah. Thank you very much for the question. First, let me say as Roche, we're very committed to being present early in many of these markets. In fact, as probably the only diagnostic company, we are oftentimes, you know, present locally in these affiliates, in these countries, when many others are still present there as a distributor. That really gives us an advantage to build the infrastructure and also the, you know, the network in the systems to help shape the healthcare system.
Regarding the targets, we do have targets, specifically even by region in every country, so including also low- and middle-income countries. We do expect that, these markets will continuously outperform, even the developed markets, as there is a lot of catch up that needs to be done. Lastly, let me say that we are also, when we look at product development, we're starting to develop also products that are more specifically suitable for some of these markets. For example, the emerging markets analyzer that Stefan mentioned that exactly fits into this segment. Also, like, on the molecular side, the cobas 5800 System, as an example, a bit lower throughput solution that fits in these markets. You also have to understand those areas.
Yes, we do have these targets for these markets, and we do believe that the share will continuously increase.
Thanks, Thomas. I would just pick another question from the chat, which come from Charles Pitman-King from Redburn. This one is about looking back. So given access to medicines has long been a key focus for large pharma, could each panelist, I think we need one for the pharma and one for the Dia side here, outline what previously implemented policy they believe has been the most effective in improving access over the past decade? What future pieces of innovation do you believe would be the greatest contribution to improving access going forward? Maybe we can start again with Thomas, or maybe Stefan as well.
I can jump in and maybe others can build on it. First of all, thank you for the question, Charles. I think it's a very good one because we have learned over the years that policies can actually drive access and adoption in different markets. It's a combination of global policies as well as local policies that may be needed. If we just think back, I think there's a number of global policies around disease eradication, whether it was cervical cancer, as mentioned earlier, whether it's tuberculosis programs, malaria programs. You can even go all the way back to polio eradication. That can have a profound impact on access to healthcare and make a great impact on society.
I mentioned a couple of local ones for local eradication programs, for instance, that make a big difference as well. There was an angle to the future, but maybe we want to stay first on sort of past ones and find either way. Well, I have the microphone. Might as well. I think that what Michael was touching on, the universal health coverage commitment that the nations have signed, has tremendous potential in terms of really building resilient healthcare systems, but also ensuring that healthcare is available to patients no matter where they are. This increase in commitment to invest in healthcare, I think will be very critical in the next 10, 15 years to come.
Maybe let me chime in to what Stefan said. I agree that a lot of the, you know, WHO initiatives, like the 90-90-90 initiative on HIV, you know, eradication of cervical cancer, the TB initiatives, et cetera, those are helpful initiatives. At the same time, you know, with support of global funds, you know, a lot of investments have gone into these parts of the world. I think we've made huge progress. Now, with the pandemic, I think there have been some setbacks because, you know, a lot of people have not been tested. At the end, you know, there is a lot of opportunity to improve healthcare in this part of the world. At the same time, given the fact that the world is lot
Much more globalized than in the past, a problem in, you know, emerging market is in the future also a problem for the global world, right? Because, especially you saw the list of all the infectious diseases, most of them appearing in the developing world. These are also the problems of the developed world. You know, funding needs to shift from the developed into the developing world to help control these diseases.
Okay. I would pick now a question from the line. The next one would be Peter Welford from Jefferies. Peter, please.
Hi. Yes. Thanks for taking my question. I've got a question. You mentioned a comment that for your low- and middle-income country pharma goal, where you said that Roche was not present in all of the low- and middle-income countries. I think you'd find that as 85. I guess I'd be curious, how many of those 85 is Roche not present in, perhaps either as a number or as a percentage of the population?
Just in those countries, do you consider or have you already in the past done examples where you've either perhaps licensed out the manufacturing to a local player for your drugs, or equally or would you consider licensing out the IP as well to local players, perhaps for a royalty-free or low royalty to enable access of those drugs to those regions? If I could just talk about you know what could potentially be done to reduce the volumes that are needed at a local capacity for some of these therapies in those areas.
Thank you, Peter. Allow me to come back to answer the question to you in writing, because for sure I would give you the wrong number. What I can tell you is we are not present in all of those countries, but we are actually almost in the majority, because even if we are not present, we usually work with local companies together, or we work with third-party suppliers. When it comes to what are we considering what we can do, particularly in those countries, as I tried to point out, is we are really looking across the value chain. What you mentioned about would we consider outsourcing it, would sort of like consider to developing volume. I have to go back to what we are currently in there.
What we're doing with local partners is really focusing on the root cause and not on the systems. That's just delivering and sort of like some arrangement that even transferring of IP in the majority of cases would not solve the problem. Because the key problem is, referring to what Thomas said, is there's basically no access to diagnostics. You have no infrastructure, there's no data infrastructure around that. We are looking at all those options together with the local stakeholders in those countries where we want to achieve the goal.
I think, Michael, if I get your question, your answer right, basically, I think, it's a bit simplified, if you just think of it as an access goal in terms of there, you know, it's a supply issue. I think, also for some of our medicines, for example, we would need a cold chain which needs to be in place and, all these hurdles which exist.
Correct.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm. Okay. I don't know. Peter, did this answer your question or do you have a follow-on question, maybe?
No, that's great. Thank you.
Mm-hmm. Thanks. Next one would be Harry Sepulveda. Harry, please.
Jo Walton here. Harry is on holiday. Can you hear me?
Yes, we can hear you. Hello.
Two questions please. Firstly on just a broader one on diagnostics. One of the issues always seems to be the silo nature of a diagnostics budget and a therapeutics budget. Have you been able to break that down and has the COVID situation really helped that, and particularly in the low- and middle-income countries? Then my second question goes to the access to medicines and just looking at your assessment here. Perhaps it follows on from Peter's, but the area where you seem not to be rated highly is in long-term supply chain capacity aims. I just wonder whether there's more local investment that you could do in terms of, I don't know, local training, local employment, just how.
Which helps sustain the healthcare ecosystem rather than doing it more remotely. I wonder if there's anything you could talk to on that.
Maybe let me take the first part on the diagnosis side. I think cervical cancer is a perfect example for that. As you rightly mentioned, there are separate budgets in the system and people are not very good in that system to shift budgets from one place to the next. I think this is where the health technology assessments are really critical to show the benefit in the system and then work with the system in making sure these budgets are reallocated. Now, one of the parts of the goals is to shorten the time to reimbursement, and one way we can do that is actually that we shape policy.
It's not only having the data, but really shaping laws and policy in the countries that, once they have all the data, that they have to make faster decisions. I think that's something where in some countries we've been faster, and then in other countries, in Germany, for example, we've been able to shape laws that accelerate the reimbursement time significantly. That's the role of the countries together with Stefan to do that. The second part to your question was around developing countries, you know, and how we see that there. Actually sometimes it helps when a system doesn't have any healthcare developed, because before you establish something new, you don't have to tear down the walls of something that existed. Sometimes with innovation, and cervical cancer was a great example.
For example, in Central America, where they were faster than other parts of the world simply because they didn't have an infrastructure and they didn't have, you know, kind of the different parts of the system that were fighting for the budget. You know, they didn't have to, yeah, take walls down before they actually were able to implement something new.
Jo, did this answer your questions or do you also looking for a question on the pharma side, I assume?
Well, on the pharma side as well, but just generally in terms of the level of local investment, because you know, one of the ways to grow a system is to invest in it and have more people involved. I don't know. Some countries like to see local manufacturing, and I just wondered whether particularly you know, given the supply chain capacity issues that access to medicine raised, whether you were looking to do more local manufacturing and local investment, you know, people on the ground.
I think maybe Michael can join in. I think on the manufacturing side, actually, even in this crisis situation which we faced with the pandemic, I think we have been able to deliver to the world. Also, there was a lot of pressure in the system to align our resources and also to seek collaborations. I think on the manufacturing side, it's probably tricky, or not that straightforward that we would branch out now in many countries and set up individual manufacturing capacity. I think on all the other parts of the value chain, and I think Michael had several examples here, I think there we actually strive for doing these investments and building local capacity.
Maybe Michael, you could here again elaborate on the examples on where we believe it makes most sense to invest in some of these low- and middle-income countries.
What we are doing is, around this, also this corporate call, and this is activities that started years before with our colleagues from supply chain management. We need in order to realize this goal and objective, what we need is local expertise. We need local experience, and we need local capabilities to implement. Where we have countries where we have the expertise and we have the experience and willingness to implement, we are looking currently what would be options, what can we do also with the colleagues of supply chain, and what would be the accurate type of knowledge transfer. Realistic challenges, there needs to be some sort of like groundwork already done, because we are not in small molecules business. Like, what we are doing, also like our supply chain.
Like, has a lot of, like, very specific capabilities you need to build around it. We're really looking into it. What I can also guarantee you is, like, there will be investment, but it's not sort of like gonna materialize and happen overnight, just because of the complexity of the area in which we operate in.
Maybe I can just add here. If you look at our current portfolio, then you see it's dominated, for example, by biologics or by antibody drugs. You see where we are present. We produce, for example, in the United States. At the East Coast, we have hubs. We have then Germany, Switzerland, Singapore and Japan. I think you just have to also think about the investments which are needed. Normally, such a biologics manufacturing facility, this is an investment of half a billion CHF, and it takes, like five years to build it up, and you need several hundred people to run it. You need a certain skilled workforce. You need a certain stable environment.
You need many suppliers, which you need, you know, reliability in terms of electricity, all these things. I think it's not that easy basically to set up a biologics manufacturing, for example, in every spot around the world. I don't know, Jo, any additional questions?
No, that's absolutely fine. I don't think any of us expect you to make monoclonal antibodies in Nigeria. Thank you very much. I'll let other people get in.
Thanks, Jo. We would have one question on the line from Mauro Alster. Mauro, please. Mauro? Okay. I think he seems to have left. Maybe we can take one more question from the chat. There's one question here from Urban Fritsche, who's focusing on infectious diseases, and his question is, "Why is Roche not developing more drugs in infectious diseases, as this seems a very important area for the diagnostics division, and synergies could be significant with pharma?" I don't know, maybe Thomas or Stefan, you quickly want to summarize our efforts on the Dia side, and then I can maybe jump in on what we recently started on the pharma side.
Yeah, sure. I think we already talked about SARS-CoV-2. As mentioned in the last call. We do have investor call for Q1. We do have launch plans, you know, pretty much the next days or maybe weeks. We're still waiting for FDA approval for the cobas SARS-CoV-2 Duo, which is a dual quantitative SARS-CoV-2 test. All the tests on the market before were not truly quantitative. We'll be launching a T-cell test for SARS-CoV-2 as well. We are continuously building out that menu. There are other infectious diseases, dengue, you know, tuberculosis, et cetera. There is a huge opportunity for us to support the world in managing those patients.
At the same time, you know, it's a big market in diagnostics, so it's absolutely critical. In looking at the diagnostics business, you need to have a full portfolio of tests because, you know, one of the reasons for customers in deciding to work with Roche is the high level of automation and the level of consolidation. Meaning that you don't need many instruments, you just need Roche to run all of your assays. This is why we continuously build out the menu. Infectious disease is a really key pillar for us in that.
Mm-hmm. I think on the pharma side, Urban, actually, we have a lot of activities ongoing. There are some projects which are preclinical. In terms of antibiotics, we have signed collaborations with external biotech companies, but we also have an in-house development program. I think we last updated at our digitalization event last November, where we basically showed that we use artificial intelligence to basically screen existing libraries with known structures which work, where we create de novo virtually novel candidates which then we test in screenings. There's several independent initiatives ongoing.
The other thing is also, I think we have a project here for in hepatitis, which we portrayed before at the Pharma Day, where we have several compounds in phase I, phase II development, where we're currently in the testing of various combinations. Infectious diseases are definitely an area where we are active in, and we also try to employ new technologies here to tackle the upcoming issues of resistances. I think this is a growing part of our early pipeline.
Let me just add, in both those programs, we're actually working together between diagnostics and pharma.
I don't know. I think with that, we would be at the end of our session. I wanted to use the occasion again also to thank several people who have made this event possible. Thanks again to all the speakers for their time and dedication and also to some of the people in the back who supported them and made the event happen. Especially, I would like to thank Teresa Schmaus. She is covering ESG and the IR team. I think many of you know her already, and she had the overall lead and was also leading on Pascale's and Michael's presentations together with Andy Walker and Margot Helin.
On the Dia side, we have Birgit Masjost, who is covering, as an IR officer, our diagnostics business, and together with Luca Ciabi and Christian Tussmann, they were responsible for developing the decks of Thomas and Stefan. Last but not least, I would thank Eva Losert, who just made the event possible, on the organizational side. I hope this event was helpful in outlining our access strategy and also our ambitions and provided some examples. I'm looking forward to a future dialogue and, if there are remaining questions, but also any suggestions, please feel free to reach out to us. Have a good day, and talk to you soon. Bye.
Thank you. Bye.