It’s NIGH Time

Last week, the Global Health Technologies Coalition (GHTC), a Gates Foundation-funded “advocacy” organization based in Washington, DC, added to the pile of reports on the US government global health policy by releasing “Saving Lives and Creating Impact” (GHTC report).  The GHTC represents a group of 40 nonprofit organizations “working to increase awareness of the urgent [...]

BD Needy

BIO Ventures for Global Health (BVGH), an advocacy group now based in San Francisco, issued a report last week, “Developing New Drugs and Vaccine for Neglected Diseases of the Poor:  The Product Developer Landscape” (BVGH report).  As I have noted in previous posts on BVGH, I’m enthusiastic about the organization’s mission- to encourage the biotech [...]

A Tale of Two Companies

In a previous post, I wrote about Medicine in Need (MEND), a Cambridge, MA-based, not-for-profit, primarily because their mission, to apply “emerging and advanced delivery and manufacturing technologies to drug and vaccine candidates for diseases of poverty,” may yield inhaleable dry powder products, a promising route for low-cost, large-scale drug and vaccine delivery.  But MEND [...]

Free Advice, Trevor

To state the obvious, the billions of dollars given way by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) have enabled much good and improved global health over the past ten years, but, as with most philanthropic endeavors, the foundation has been weak in measuring the effectiveness of its grants and the performance of its grantees.   [...]

Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise Reprise

Back on 9/23/10, I commented on the recommendations of two researchers to aid the growing biotech and pharma industry sector of the developing world and made a few of my own recommendations.  Recently I noted that the government of India is supporting “pre-venture activity” (Forbes article), a good idea that was not mentioned, and want [...]

Bits and Bytes from the Info-stream

Since I’m traveling this week and don’t have regular access to a computer, I’m dipping into the info-stream to comment on a few items that have come to my attention recently and by-passing the hard work of a more thoughtful commentary.  Here goes: Costs of drug discovery:   I saw that a recent publication on this [...]

Open Source Sesame

One concept for accelerating the development of drugs for neglected diseases (i.e., those whose treatment is not reimbursed by insurance companies) is application of the “open source” innovation model which originated the software industry.  This model is based on easy access to source code, distributed work among unaffiliated programmers, and rights to use (and sell) [...]

Starting Uphill

Start up companies face a tough go- converting a new technology into saleable products on minimal funding- and those aiming at products for global health have even a harder challenge by swimming against the conventional wisdom that a highly-priced, reimbursable product is the only way to profitability.  But one piece to solving the currently intractable [...]

ReDuX Part II

At the risk of sounding like a malfunctioning obsolete acoustical storage media, I am returning to the topic of last week’s post:  the launch of the Xpert® MTB/RIF diagnostic test which the WHO stated could “revolutionize” TB care and control (Reuters article).  WHO approved the test and issued a “Roadmap” to guide purchasers to the [...]

Yet Another

In previous posts I have noted the proliferation of commissions, centers, institutes, and advisory groups which conduct numerous studies, analyses, and reviews and publish a host of reports, conclusions, summaries, and policy guidance in the name of improving global health, but mostly, it seems to me, aim to steer money to themselves and their pet [...]