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• Big Pharma, Billionaires, and Diseases in the Developing World

  October 22, 2010 | Bolivia | by Helen Coster

  Next month I’m heading to Bolivia, as part of a fellowship with the International Reporting Project. I’ll be there for five weeks, reporting primarily on public health—a longtime personal and professional interest of mine. Yesterday I had a fascinating meeting with Dr. Isabela Ribeiro, a senior project manager at the Drugs for Neglected Disease initiative (DNDi). DNDi is a non-profit drug development partnership that works to research and develop new and improved treatments for neglected diseases such as malaria, leishmaniasis, and Chagas disease. These diseases affect the world’s poorest people, and they often get ignored by pharmaceutical companies for a simple economic reason: there is no way that considerable investment in research will be recouped in drug sales. DNDi was founded in 2003 with backing from a number of foundations, government organizations, and NGOs, and in the public health world it’s...

• A Creative Model for Vaccine Development

  October 22, 2010 | Bolivia | by Helen Coster

  I’m in Washington, D.C. as part of a fellowship with the International Reporting Project. Next Saturday I head to Bolivia, where I’ll be reporting and writing on public health and a number of different topics. One advantage of spending time in D.C.—in addition to meeting other IRP fellows and running past the White House— is the opportunity to meet with the world-class scientists and policy makers who work here. Yesterday I met with Dr. Peter Hotez, the president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute, a non-profit organization that’s affiliated with George Washington University. The Sabin Institute—named after Dr. Albert Sabin, who developed the polio vaccine— develops vaccines for Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs), a group of 13 diseases that affect poor people in the developing world. NTDs include diseases like guinea worm, Chagas disease, kala azar and lymphatic filariasis. Together they...