Victoria Hale |
Faced with a personal dilemma in the working world -- loving your
profession and the people with whom you're doing it but not necessarily
where or how you're doing it -- often causes many to flee a damaged
workplace for safer ground or, worse still, to grumble in silence
and feeling that their work merely lines the pockets of a few people
and truly helps even fewer.
Ex-FDA staffer Victoria Hale took that frustration and built America's
first non-profit drug company, the Institute
for OneWorld Health, some four years ago.
It all started with her disillusionment while at the FDA and the
shenanigans of the major drug companies that placed perfectly good
pharmaceuticals that could cure "orphaned diseases" --
disease conditions that affect less than 200,000 Americans but far
many more in developing countries -- on a back shelf. The other
compelling reason Hale formed her non-profit organization: The movement
of the health industry into lifestyle issues such as impotence,
baldness and memory loss held far less appeal than working on global
health. And there was no major new drug company R&D for diseases
affecting the world's poorest people.
The goals of the institute:
- Identify undervalued chemicals or drugs created by academics
or drug companies but not being developed
- Match them with very important diseases in the developing world
- Place them through clinical trials
- Get regulatory approvals
- Distribute them to people who need them
Many -- including tax agencies -- were skeptical the United States
really needed a non-profit drug company. But Hale's aim was to forgo
the existing drug-making paradigm by using existing technology and
methods to benefit the world.
Hale and her organization have chosen their first four disease
states, including leishmaniasis, a skin infection transmitted to
people by sand flies that kills 200,000 people every year, more
than the number of people killed by strokes in the United States.
To date, 22 soldiers who fought in Iraq, Kuwait or Afghanistan have
suffered from one form of leishmaniasis, which affect many more
native people in those countries and can be fatal.
Parasites and poverty are tightly linked, Hale says, but "big
pharma" has not really been looking at parasite-borne diseases
since the 1960s, thus the gap her institute hopes to fill.
New
Scientist.com September 27, 2004
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