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Big Help from Big Pharma

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American


Activists often slam large pharmaceutical companies for failing to develop drugs that are of critical importance to the developing world.

Andrew Witty, GlaxoSmithKline's youthful chief executive, gave those critics pause yesterday in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City.

Witty promised to sell the company's malaria vaccine that is in late-stage clinical trials in Africa for no more than a 5 percent profit. At the same time, he is inviting other researchers to work on combatting  the mosquito-borne malady at a company laboratory in Spain and will make public a library of thousands of compounds screened for leads against malaria, according to a report at Forbes.com.


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Witty is setting an example for the entire industry at a time when new drug pipelines are increasingly challenged and the companies may only be able to survive if they are able to devise innovative new strategies in collaboration with governments, academia and the biotech industry.

Glaxo's move may bode well for the ultimate fate of Unitaid, an attempt to pool patents to let generic drug manufacturers create inexpensive HIV drugs.

Kudos to Witty. Now let's see if the rest of the industry can respond in kind. We need other drug giants with ample resources to step up for schistosomiasis, Chagas disease and the like.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gary Stix, Scientific American's neuroscience and psychology editor, commissions, edits and reports on emerging advances and technologies that have propelled brain science to the forefront of the biological sciences. Developments chronicled in dozens of cover stories, feature articles and news stories, document groundbreaking neuroimaging techniques that reveal what happens in the brain while you are immersed in thought; the arrival of brain implants that alleviate mood disorders like depression; lab-made brains; psychological resilience; meditation; the intricacies of sleep; the new era for psychedelic drugs and artificial intelligence and growing insights leading to an understanding of our conscious selves. Before taking over the neuroscience beat, Stix, as Scientific American's special projects editor, oversaw the magazine's annual single-topic special issues, conceiving of and producing issues on Einstein, Darwin, climate change, nanotechnology and the nature of time. The issue he edited on time won a National Magazine Award. Besides mind and brain coverage, Stix has edited or written cover stories on Wall Street quants, building the world's tallest building, Olympic training methods, molecular electronics, what makes us human and the things you should and should not eat. Stix started a monthly column, Working Knowledge, that gave the reader a peek at the design and function of common technologies, from polygraph machines to Velcro. It eventually became the magazine's Graphic Science column. He also initiated a column on patents and intellectual property and another on the genesis of the ingenious ideas underlying new technologies in fields like electronics and biotechnology. Stix is the author with his wife, Miriam Lacob, of a technology primer called Who Gives a Gigabyte: A Survival Guide to the Technologically Perplexed (John Wiley & Sons, 1999).

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