Princeton- May 2024- Bristol Myers Squibb announced ASPIRE (Accessibility, Sustainability, Patient-centric, Impact, Responsibility and Equity), a 10-year strategy to advance access to innovative treatments and help patients in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) gain access to potentially life-saving medicines. This strategy supports the company’s commitment to reach more than 200,000 patients in LMICs by 2033 with its innovative treatments.
“Access to potentially life-saving innovative medicines is very limited in some parts of the world, leaving patients with few treatment options for serious diseases like cancer,” said Christopher Boerner, Ph.D., board chair and chief executive officer, Bristol Myers Squibb. “Bristol Myers Squibb believes patients who can benefit from our medicines should have access to them. Our ASPIRE strategy is an important step toward accelerating and expanding patient access to these much-needed treatments.”
As part of ASPIRE, Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) is developing tailored strategies to increase affordability and availability of its medicines in LMICs. BMS ensures patients can access our potentially life-saving medicines by supporting 100 percent of our marketed products with access plans. Today BMS have defined access pathways for every country in which our medicines may be available to patients.
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BMS is also making its medicines available where we don’t have a commercial presence through the Direct Import and the Direct-to-Institution pathways. Through the Direct Import pathway, BMS is providing access to 12 medicines in more than 80 LMICs, using tiered pricing commensurate with affordability. The Direct-to-Institution (DTI) pathway is a scalable and sustainable channel that provides safe, broad, timelier access to BMS’ innovative medicines to multiple patients through collaboration with local institutions. The company’s initial DTI efforts are in five LMICs in East Africa and Pakistan and West Africa in 2025, with the goal of scaling to more than 15 LMICs by 2026.
BMS is leading the way for access to immuno-oncology therapies in LMICs by collaborating with the Access to Oncology Medicines (ATOM) Coalition. BMS joined the ATOM Coalition as a founding supporter at its launch in 2022. Working with the ATOM Coalition and their partners, BMS will make Opdivo™ (nivolumab) available via a safe, scalable and sustainable access model in select countries including Pakistan, Rwanda and Zambia while working to develop an integrated pathway that can expand access in multiple LMICs by 2026.
