The world’s richest man, Bill Gates, has set the medical community a $200-million challenge to narrow the health gap between the west and the developing world.
Inspired by a 19th century German mathematician who challenged his colleagues to solve the profession’s 23 thorniest problems, Gates is calling on medical researchers to devote more effort to the diseases which kill millions of poor people each year.
Only 10% of the $70-billionn spent on developing new drugs each year is devoted to the diseases which cause 90% of the world’s health burden.
Pharmaceutical companies devote most of their research budgets to searching for blockbuster drugs which could make millions of pounds in the west, such as anti-obesity remedies and treatments for heart disease.
”There is great potential for science and technology to solve persistent global health challenges, but far greater resources are needed,” Gates said at the launch of the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
In the past 25 years, nearly 1 400 new drugs have been developed but only 16 of them were for tropical diseases and tuberculosis, which by themselves count for 10% of the world disease burden, according to research by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).
”Future prospects are poor, as the pipeline of new drugs for the most neglected diseases is empty,” the researchers warned in an article published last year in the medical journal the Lancet.
Despite claims by the pharmaceutical industry that it needs strict patent rules to encourage research, MSF says the evidence shows that tighter intellectual property regimes have done little to encourage innovation.
Many of the latest drugs are slight variations on existing blockbusters, representing little or no therapeutic advance.
”We are getting more and more drugs of less and less use, while a number of major killers are being completely ignored,” said Nathan Ford, a policy analyst at MSF in London.
Among the urgent challenges Gates hopes the new initiative will address are finding a drug to stop recurrent TB, new approaches to protecting children from diarrhoea and respiratory infections and investigating ways of making mosquitoes incapable of passing on malaria.
”By accelerating research to overcome scientific obstacles in Aids, malaria and other diseases, millions of lives could be saved,” Gates said.
His charity, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is already one of the major funders of research into a vaccine for Aids.
The initiative will provide competitive grants to teams of scientists around the world to search for solutions to the challenges, which will be identified by a scientific board.
Drug research is a highly commercialised field, with nine-tenths of the world’s drugs developed by the large pharmaceutical companies.
”Leaving it up to the private sector doesn’t work,” said Ford of MSF. ”Drugs are an essential public good and should be researched and developed according to medical need, not profit prospects.”
In 1900, the highly regarded German mathematician David Hilbert delivered a challenge to the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris. He listed what he judged to be the 23 most significant unsolved problems to be tackled in the 20th century. Most of them are — to ordinary people — downright bewildering. For instance, he asked: could the continuum of numbers be considered a well-ordered set? Could the axioms of logic be proven to be consistent? Could anybody develop a topology of real algebraic curves and surfaces?
No prize money was on offer, but in the next 100 years, the challenge attracted the world’s best minds and many questions were settled.
Two years ago another meeting in Paris proposed a new set of challenges, this time with cash prizes. Landon Clay, a Boston businessman, offered $1-million for the solution of seven problems — one of them a survivor from the original list by Hilbert — which had resisted all previous assaults. However, the so-called millennium problems were so fiendishly difficult that one pundit suggested that the prizes may never be won. – Guardian Unlimited Â