

Partnerships parlay resources into healthy solutions


The answer is: public/private partnerships.

The question is: What is the best way to secure the future of the Pacific Northwest as a leader in biotechnology while simultaneously addressing the most pressing global health issues?

Public/private partnerships have moved beyond "feel good" philanthropic arrangements and into the realm of breakthrough innovation and legitimate commercial reward. As with many business concepts, there is a tendency to take public/private partnerships at face value. Company X helps fund a project by nonprofit Y and everyone can feel good about what they've done. But the truth is that these partnerships produce deeper results, and are more critical to true innovation than anyone may have anticipated. How so? Let me illustrate with a story.

Last year marked the 50th anniversary of the development of the Salk polio vaccine.

The rapid deployment of this vaccine in the 1950s and 1960s quickly changed the lives of Americans by eliminating one of the gravest public health threats we had ever faced. But getting this innovation into poor countries was excruciatingly slow. In 1990, more than 100 countries were still afflicted by the ravages of polio. In the end, delivery of polio vaccine to the farthest reaches of our world relied on important ancillary technologies. And those technologies relied on the power of public/private partnerships.

Enter the vaccine vial monitor (VVM).

Try getting the extremely heat-sensitive polio vaccine from a high-tech pharmaceutical company in Europe to a remote village in Ethiopia. The vaccine leaves the factory by truck, is flown to Africa, and then is carried by truck or bicycle over dirt roads to a refrigerator in a rural clinic with only sporadic access to electricity. The journey, lasting days or weeks, puts the vaccine at risk of being spoiled. Too often these vital vaccines are damaged but still used, or tossed out because health workers assume they have gone bad. To solve this problem, our international nonprofit organization PATH began development of a time-temperature indicator to let health workers know when a vaccine had been exposed to excess heat.