Bristol Myers Squibb Announces 10-Year Strategy to Reach More Patients in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Bristol Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMY) today announced ASPIRE (Accessibility, Sustainability, Patient-centric, Impact, Responsibility and Equity), a 10-year strategy to advance access to our 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. Our work to help ensure patients who need our potentially life-saving medicines can access them begins by ensuring that 100 percent of our marketed products are supported by access plans. Today we have defined access pathways for every country in which our medicines may be available to patients.

In low- and middle-income countries, to help improve the affordability of our medicines, we have introduced local brands of many of our innovative medicines to address affordability issues, expand access, and help reduce the time lag between the availability of our medicines in higher-income countries and lower-income countries. In 2023, BMS filed a total of 11 local brands of which five received regulatory approvals. BMS local brands are making an impact in countries like Thailand, which has the highest prevalence of beta thalassemia, by providing treatment options like Rojusna to help combat this widespread disease.

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.