Making drugs, not profits.

The article details what led to the authors' creation of a nonprofit drug company to fight neglected diseases in the developing world. When Victoria Hale left her job as a pharmacologist at Genentech in 1998, she made a list of areas that she felt the pharmaceutical industry had ignored: orphan drugs for metabolic disorders, treatments for substance abuse, modernization of contraceptives, and global infectious disease. Haledecided that fighting infectious disease would have the most pronounced impact on public health. Philippe M. P. Desjeux of WHO suggested that an opportunity existed for an off-patent antibiotic that needed one last clinical trial to prove its worth as a drug against a deadly parasite, Leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease transmitted by sand flies. Most visceral leishmaniasis cases are in poor populations in just a few countries: India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sudan and Brazil. Last May, OneWorld and WHO started a clinical trial of paromomycin in India, according to Hale's husband, Ahvie Herskowitz. In 2000 they launched the Institute for OneWorld Health. The first obstacle was bureaucratic: getting Internal Revenue Service approval for a nonprofit pharmaceutical company. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation agreed to provide $4.7 million.