It is often said that wealth is something accumulated, not spent.
But it’s rare to find a general consensus on why we should accumulate it at all.
Great wealth affords almost limitless purchasing power and investment possibilities, and opportunities grow exponentially when you are one of the richest people in the world.
Bill Gates, currently the second-richest person on the planet, boasts a net-worth of $56 billion and has built one of the largest tech-company empires from the ground up.
Why create such an empire, and what do you do with such unimaginable wealth?
Gates and his wife Melinda have answered this question by creating the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a privately funded enterprise with an endowment of $33.5 billion.
By funneling the money of America’s top philanthropists, including Warren Buffett, the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation is attempting to tackle global issues like health, poverty and education.
Specifically, the Global Health Program subsidiary assists in the development of new ways to treat and prevent infectious diseases in impoverished countries by issuing grants to universities and other research initiatives.
Gates’ philanthropy comes during an era of great need, as the combination of growing antibiotic resistance and poor health care in developing countries has many physicians and researchers frustrated and frightened.
However, clashes between the public and private sector have slowed the production of new antibiotics and medicines to a crawl, and the World Health Organization predicts an
impending medical disaster if the pipeline of new drugs is not unclogged.
According to Matthew Cooper, a professor at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, and David Shlaes, a former vice president at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, the number of pharmaceutical companies researching new antibiotics has been reduced from 18 to four in the past 21 years.
There have only been four new classes of antibiotics produced in the last 40 years, a statistic Cooper and Shlaes deem unacceptable.
Cooper and Shlaes also explain that a phase III clinical trial for an antibiotic’s effectiveness on one disease costs about $70 million. As the risks are high, this is a price neither venture capital nor government grants will cover.
The London School of Economics proposed a solution to these issues in 2009: “push-pull” incentives by the government to entice the production of new medicines.
The push incentives would lower the cost of market entry for small, upstart drug companies, while the pull incentives offer an array of benefits, like patent extensions, to larger, well-established drug developers.
While the LSE’s plan adheres to sound logic, it still relies too heavily on taxpayer money and the private sector’s willingness to accumulate losses for the general public’s benefit.
Gates’ funding fills in the cracks of such a plan and stands to do more than help the scientific community play catch-up — his initiative may eventually spell the end for some communicable disease in the Third World.
Also, though the GHP focuses on infectious diseases, it is only a matter of time before the GHP expands to fund cancer treatment.
Revolutionary techniques in cancer drug development, like those utilized by the cancer drug Gleevac, already exist and can be expanded upon by Gates’ funding.
This drug, invented by Brian Druker, a researcher at the Oregon Health and Science University, employs a method of curing chronic myelogenous leukemia by specifically targeting cancer cells, not rapidly dividing cells, as chemotherapy does.
Jim Watson, president of Cold Spring Harbor Labs, said in a PBS documentary that cancer is not so much an academic problem anymore, but rather a problem for the pharmaceutical companies.
The same can be said for antibiotic, as well.
Gates’ venture philanthropy may become the catalyst that stirs pharmaceutical companies back into action again and saves lives across the world.
Chris Freyder is a 21-year-old biological sciences junior from New Orleans. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_Cfreyder.