Two thousand and ten has seen a lot of changes in the world and for BIO Ventures for Global Health (BVGH). How would you characterize the past year for the organization?
In 2010, our emphasis has really been on execution. We've taken our past learnings about what's needed to make it easier for companies to be involved in global health, and put those ideas into practice.
Two examples of this are our work on incentives and our work on the Global Health Primer. These projects fall into what we think are pretty important categories: providing good quality information for companies to be aware of global health opportunities, and putting forward incentives that make it possible for companies to overcome the financial barriers to getting involved in global health.
We've been talking for a while about incentives, and this year we completed the design of a milestone-based incentive that can be applied to multiple solutions, such as new drugs for Chagas disease or point of care diagnostics. We're currently in the stage of going out and finding sponsorship of this incentive.
With the Global Health Primer, we reached out and really listened to companies to learn what kind of information they actually need. This led to us not just updating the Global Health Primer, but expanding the Primer pretty substantially to track the product pipelines and molecular targets and also provide key information including the description of scientific opportunity; tools available for developing new drugs, vaccines, and diagnostics; development risks; and key players in each disease area.
You have been outspoken about the importance of finding the common ground between the goals of global health and the pragmatic needs of companies. Do you think you've been able to capture some of this common ground in 2010?
I do think that we are finding more common ground between the goals of global health and needs of industry. One great example of this is the Pool for Open Innovation against Neglected Tropical Disease. For me, what the Pool represents is something very different from what we've seen before, in that industry took the initiative to come forward with a program aimed at trying to make additional company resources available for developing new products for neglected tropical diseases. This shows me that we've gone beyond where we've been in the past, when the public sector would come up with the good ideas and then try to entice industry into them. I think we saw a real switch this year -- companies are really focused on doing good in global health and we saw many programs come forward, of which the Pool for Open Innovation is just one example.
So that, for me, is pretty exciting. But there are a few things that have me worried. This year, we've also seen the rise of programs where companies are pressured to go into something that is clearly not workable from an industrial perspective, such as the Health Impact Fund or the HIV Patent Pool. I am concerned that these are signs that that common ground that's been so hard won could fray because these types of efforts clearly do not take into account the business realities of companies.
In 2010, BVGH published the Diagnostics Innovation Map, a report on the state of diagnostics in the developing world. What did you learn from this and what do you see as the future role of diagnostics in combating neglected tropical diseases?
What we found after publishing the Diagnostics Innovation Map is that, in general, there is an increasing recognition of the importance of point of care diagnostics. We're getting to the point where accurate diagnosis of disease is becoming critical and we have to be cognizant of the fact that "diagnose and then treat" is not the paradigm in most poor countries. And in some ways that paradigm is shifting around us as treatments are becoming more expensive and demand for higher quality of care is emerging. That higher quality of care is dependent on diagnostics.
We've followed up the Diagnostics Innovation Map with taking our milestone-based incentive and applying it to point of care diagnostics. What we've found is that there's a lot of interest among diagnostics companies and also, increasingly, disease-focused groups in the global health community about trying to improve our ability to diagnose. Definitely a trend that we see is a need to move away from the disease-by-disease diagnostic approach -- a diagnostic for tuberculosis, a diagnostic for malaria, a diagnostic for HIV -- and to actually see more integrated panels where a person is being diagnosed, not a disease.
Any last thoughts about 2010?
It's pretty amazing that in a time when the pharma industry is still trying to recover from the economic crisis, we haven't really seen a retrenchment in global health programs. As a matter of fact, it certainly appears that we've seen an expansion of them. CEOs are spending significant amounts of time working with global health organizations, and this work is continuing and growing. I think that's a pretty wonderful thing.
