3.21.2007 - 08:00am ET

(CSRwire) March 21, 2007 – Innovest Strategic Value Advisors announced today the successful completion of the first phase of one of its most innovative current projects – the creation of a global Access to Medicine (ATM) Index of major pharmaceutical companies for institutional investors.

The new Index will rate and rank the pharmaceutical companies, based on their performance and positioning on ATM issues. The project is a logical extension of Innovest’s previous work creating indexes based on companies' performance on other "sustainability" issues such as climate change, eco-efficiency and community investment. The Index was first proposed by the Access to Medicine Foundation in the Netherlands, and Innovest has been doing the research and analysis in collaboration with the Foundation and outside experts.

"For major pharmaceutical companies, the access to medicine issue represents one of the most difficult management challenges they face", said Andy White, Innovest's global Managing Director of research. "We fully expect that our institutional investor clients will pay close attention to this new index as a way to gain a fuller understanding of the overall quality of management of the various companies which are in - and not in - the new Index. We commend Wim Leereveld and his team at the Access to Medicine Foundation for taking the first steps to put ATM issues squarely on the investors’ agenda. In our experience, it is a very short step from that stage to a significantly raised awareness by company CEO’s and boards, and then to improved practices. This new ATM index could become a real game-changer."

According to the World Health Organization, approximately 30% of the world’s population – between 1.3 and 2.1 billion people lack regular access to medicine. In an effort to address the major global imbalance surrounding access to medicine (ATM), the Access to Medicine Foundation engaged Innovest to create a framework to evaluate global pharmaceutical companies on the issue.

The framework focuses on eight evaluation criteria and will be the foundation of an annual Access to Medicine Index. The criteria and their relative importance were established after extensive stakeholder engagement with academics, consultants, investors, government representatives and non-governmental organizations (NGO's) from around the globe. The next step of the project will entail consulting key pharmaceutical players and commencing an industry benchmarking assessment in order to compile the first ATM Index. The index will be available to the investment community in late 2007, and the information underpinning it will be used to make further progress towards ATM goals set forth by the international community.

For more information on the eight Access to Medicine criteria, please visit, www.access-to-medicine.org

About Innovest

Innovest Strategic Value Advisors is an international investment research and advisory firm specializing in analyzing companies' performance on environmental, social, and strategic governance issues, with a particular focus on their impact on competitiveness, profitability, and share price performance. Innovest's institutional investor clients manage combined assets of over $7 trillion. Innovest was recently rated the #1 global provider of “non-traditional” investment research in the Thomson Extel survey of institutional investors. The firm is also the only pure research provider to be recommended by the Enhanced Analytics Initiative.

Innovest has offices in New York City, Toronto, San Francisco, London, Paris, Sydney, and Tokyo.

About Access to Medicine Foundation

The Access to Medicine Foundation is based in Haarlem, the Netherlands, and supported by the European Agency for Development and Health, the Dutch Ministry for Foreign Affairs, major Dutch NGO's including Oxfam Novib, and Rabobank. The UK Department for International Development has announced funding partnership for the first Access To Medicine Index to be published in the second half of 2007.