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:
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
This story ought to show you I'm merely one of growing number of physicians and layman who are working hard every day to chisel away at the long established and well-defended health care paradigm that seeks to cure virtually everything under the sun regardless of the long-term consequences on the patient with drugs, often a temporary solution at best to permanent problems.
Among many things, that means mega-billion pharmaceutical companies developing multiple iterations of the same drugs for the same conditions just to protect their marketshare and to keep their coffers flush with cash.
For those reasons and many more besides, I was impressed with Hale's vision to overturn the health care nightmare in her own field by establishing America's first non-profit drug company to help others around the world. Typically, I wouldn't be wasting valuable space on this Web site to applaud the work of ANY drug company, but Hale's non-profit group is a pleasant surprise and exception.
One interesting thing I learned about by reading Hale's story: A compassion for saving lives among scientists who work in R&D at various for-profit drug companies I thought didn't and couldn't exist.
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