UNITAID’s Chair, Celso Amorim, has joined a high-level panel of experts as part of a project conducted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on securing sustainable access to innovative therapies.

Mr Amorim attended an inaugural meeting of the panel in Paris on Tuesday in which panellists discussed, among other things, whether there were problems in pharmaceutical markets that need to be tackled and, if so, whether  they could agree on a diagnosis.

The project was initiated by France and endorsed by OECD member countries.

Members of the panel include prominent medical and health experts from the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Japan, Austria and Australia, including Suzanne Hill, who heads the Essential Medicines and Health Products Department of the WHO and Richard Horton, Editor of the Lancet. Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz is also a panel member but did not attend Tuesday’s session.

Mr Amorim has served on two high-level United Nations panels, devoted respectively to global access to medicines and to the global response to health crises.