Dr. Victoria Hale Named MacArthur Fellow

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation named Victoria Hale, founder and chief executive officer of the Institute for OneWorld Health, a 2006 MacArthur Fellow today. According to the Washington Post, the award ($25,000 quarterly for the next five years)

will offer an (her) opportunity to step back and do more networking and strategic planning for her start-up company. That nonprofit works to develop and deliver pharmaceuticals to developing countries and has been funded by the Gates Foundation.

The Institute for One World Health is the first nonprofit pharmaceutical company founded in the United States. Its mission was "to develop safe, effective, and affordable new medicines for those most in need." In order to develop the pipeline of potential drug leads into approved new medicines at a fraction of the cost of conventional pharmaceutical development the Institute's

team stressed partnership and collaboration with industry and international research institutions. To ensure affordability, they sought donated and royalty-free licensing of intellectual property and identified research and manufacturing capacity in the developing world.

With early investment from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, collaboration with the World Health Organization and the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and alliances with biotechnology firms such as Celera Genomics, OneWorld Health has completed final stage testing of a promising new therapy to cure visceral leishmaniasis in India.

The drug, Paromomycin IM Injection, was approved for use by the Government of India on August 31st of this year.

Thus we have a not-for-profit organization with foundation funding stepping in to catalyze partnerships among the U.S. Government, the scientific community, and industry -- utilizing donated intellectual property rights -- to create a new biomedical technology for an unmet health need of the developing world.