Two pharmaceutical giants with facilities in Montgomery County placed at the very top of this year’s Access to Medicine Index, with GlaxoSmithKline coming in as the top ranked company, writes Donald G. McNeil Jr. for The New York Times.

GSK, which has a state-of-the-art lab in Collegeville, retained the top spot for the fifth consecutive time since the introduction of the index in 2008. Merck made it to fifth this year, moving up two places.

The index was started by a Dutch former pharmaceutical executive Wim Leerveld to measure how well the top 20 pharmaceutical companies around the globe do at making their drugs and vaccines available to the world’s poorest countries.

The list has grown in importance over time, thanks to early support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as well as the Dutch and British governments. While at first, drug companies tended to ignore requests for information, today nearly all of them cooperate, and even compete to do well on the list.

Read more about the rankings at The New York Times by clicking here.