Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to complete one, or all, of our three challenges!

The E$$ENTIAL MEDICINE$ project has created a new set of challenges that are more engaging and make it easy and fun to participate and contribute to the project! The challenges increase in their level of complexity and can be completed time and time again, investigating different medicines from the long list of essential medicines. The information provided through these challenges will help us make sense of the ocean of information that is out there, bringing it all together to create a unified database accessible to all.

ABOUT THE CHALLENGES

News flash invites you to share what you’ve been hearing about medicines, in the news

Topics related to public health, medical treatments and medications are often discussed in the news and through social media outlets. Assembling this information to keep track of important developments in the field is one of the goals of E$$ENTIAL MEDICINE$. These could be topic related to repurposing known medicines for new uses, clinical trials, shortages in medicine availability, new medicines or anything else related to medicines use, accessibility and development. 

Price hike invites you to join us on a mission in the pursuit of information about medicine pricing

Price hikes are sudden or large increases in medicine prices, often triggered by pharmaceutical companies attempts to make larger profits. A well known price hike which occurred in 2015 was of the essential medicine pyrimethamine (known by its brand name Daraprim), whose price was hiked up by 5000% overnight in the USA going from 13.50 USD per pill to 750 USD. Such price hikes can be a significant cause of price increase, making certain medicines not accessible for large populations.

One of the goals of E$$ENTIAL MEDICINE$ is to increase the availability, accessibility and affordability of essential medicine to people around the world. But to do this, we first need to identify those medicines which are not available, accessible and/or affordable. This is why we are interested in collecting information on medicine pricing and in particular on price hikes.

Circle of Life invites you to join us on a mission in the pursuit of information about the history of essential medicines

Think of the Circle Of Life as a 'family tree' that details all the important life events for an essential medicine. This may include the medicine's names, dates of birth, ownerships and general history. Each medicine has a unique history and life span, some may have lived a quiet life while others will have a very extensive history full of mergers, acquisitions and name changes. Together, this information will help us to understand why and how the accessibility of some of the essential medicines has changed over time.