NEW YORK/GENEVA/BALI, November 12, 2024 — At this year’s annual Union World Conference on Lung Health, more than 70 tuberculosis (TB) activists, including those with Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), took the stage during the opening ceremony to demand that medical test maker Cepheid and its parent corporation Danaher reduce the price of GeneXpert tests to $5 in low- and middle-income countries.
While Danaher reduced the price of the standard TB test by 20 percent in September 2023 from $10 to $8, the test used to detect the most-deadly form of TB, extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB), remains priced out of reach for many at $15 per test. Research commissioned by MSF in 2019 shows that GeneXpert cartridges could be produced and sold at a profit for less than $5 each. Cepheid and Danaher charge up to three times that for the XDR-TB, HIV, and hepatitis C tests, among others. Meanwhile, Cepheid received $252 million in public funding to develop the GeneXpert test.
