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Have an international agreement that every country pays an amount based on the GDP into a fund and distribute that money based on prior research success. Make the results available to everyone at no costs and let them produce and sell drugs at self cost prices. No profits for investors, no patents, more or less fair research cost distributions, drugs as cheap as they can get. A global solution for a global problem.

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How do you determine what the correct level of funding is for the project?

We can solve problems beyond pharmaceuticals with a command economy style approach if we can come up with a good methodology for resource allocation.

Use current global spendings as a baseline and adjust from time to time. If you have more money available than researchers to pay you can decrease spendings, if you desire faster progress throw more money at it. Besides the added complexity of a global scale undertaking I see no reasons that it is fundamentally harder to do then say planning the budget for road construction and maintenance or other national infrastructure spendings.

EDIT: In the case of drugs we also have a somewhat exceptional situation, we have a pretty good idea of what the demand is and what the benefits of satisfying a specific demand will be.

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