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James Bagnall, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Thursday, February 22, 2007
OTTAWA -- So now we have a new mission statement from Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft. He once famously proclaimed his goal was to put a computer on every desktop.
Tuesday, before a gathering of several hundred business managers, lawyers and financial specialists, Gates talked about developing vaccines for the world's "top 20 diseases." HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C and malaria headed his list and he speculated the job could be done within "10 to 15 years."
Gates is backing his words with money, lots of it, through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that manages the vast bulk of his nearly $30 billion U.S. in donations.
On Tuesday he contributed 20 per cent of a $139 million Cdn program aimed at developing HIV/AIDS vaccines for poor countries. The federal government will pick up 80 per cent of the cost.
Since June, when Gates said he would leave his day-to-day job as Microsoft chairman in July 2008 to work full-time for the foundation, he has clearly been doing a lot of thinking about how to apply business to his new role.
The big question is whether his experience as a software entrepreneur has equipped him to be good at it. The brutally competitive computer industry, with its relatively short product development cycles, is hugely different from the world of vaccines and philanthropy.
Gates's good friend Warren Buffett -- who is contributing more than $30 billion U.S. to the Gates Foundation over the next 20 years -- acknowledged as much in a recent interview with Fortune magazine. "The feedback on philanthropy is very slow and that would bother me," he said.
"In philanthropy, also, you have to make some big mistakes. Bill and Melinda will have a better batting average than I would," he added in explanation of why he wasn't taking on the job himself.
Certainly, Gates brings enthusiasm to the job. Buffett noted that his friend has been reading "thousands of pages annually" to keep up with medical advances. The crash course in biotech was evident at Tuesday's meetings in Ottawa. Gates referred to biotech and software as the globe's "two most dynamic industries," growing animated as he outlined one of his foundation's key missions --to develop low-cost drugs for the poor.
The foundation's focus, he explained, was global health, "not rich country diseases." It's not an original notion. But what's interesting is the speed of Gates's learning in biotech and where it's leading him.
As Microsoft founder, CEO, then chairman, Gates was so consumed by computing and software that he barely noticed the rest of the world until the mid-1990s. His wife Melinda showed him an article about dying children in Africa -- which moved him to inquire what was being done in terms of research. The answer shocked him: very little.
When his foundation donated $50 million U.S. in 1999 to combat malaria, he was surprised to learn he had just doubled the amount of money available from the private sector to fight the disease.
The obvious conclusion: the market system had failed profoundly. Poor countries had no money, so drugs were neither developed nor purchased. The Gates Foundation moved into the void and, in effect, became the market. It would pay for R&D and medicine.
The foundation is doing so through various partnerships such as the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization. Earlier this month, the foundation contributed $50 million U.S. to a five-country consortium that is investing $1.5 billion U.S. to develop a vaccine to prevent pneumococcal disease. (Canada contributed $200 million U.S.).
Gates is also lining up pharmaceutical companies such as Britain's GlaxoSmithKline to help develop the vaccines. At first blush, this would appear to offer direct competition to potential blockbuster vaccines now under development at companies such as California-based Gilead Sciences (HIV/ AIDS drugs and Tamiflu, the bird flu remedy) and Vertex Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge, Massachusetts (Hepatitis C vaccine).
However, Gates appears to have something much more targeted in mind for poorer countries. "Anything that will save a life for less than $1,000," is how he characterized the types of medicines his foundation will help to develop.
In part, this will be done by tweaking drugs now under development in the West, for use in poorer countries. For example, the foundation has financed trials for an anti-HIV drug based on a platform developed by Gilead to fight chronic hepatitis B.
But the entrepreneur in Gates seems willing also to finance entirely new classes of medicine.
Will Gates have the patience to see things through? Gates certainly recognizes he is dealing with long time horizons in biotech. For instance, scientists at Vertex began designing their anti-hepatitis drug in earnest 10 years ago and the company is still in phase II clinical trials -- perhaps years away from finally receiving approval for sale.
Gates Tuesday suggested he has long understood the need for strategic research, even at Microsoft. He pointed out that his company started R&D a decade ago on how to send television signals over the Internet -- an effort that is only now beginning to pay off. Speech recognition technology, he added, has yet to mature even though Microsoft has been developing it for more than 10 years.
Gates, at 51, appears reasonably comfortable with biotech's exorbitant demands, which include time and complexity. Less surprisingly, he is also fine with the sheer hubris of the assignment he is handing the foundation that bears his name -- to find a cure for everything viral and save millions of lives.
- Bagnall writes for the Ottawa Citizen.
Published: Thursday, February 22, 2007
OTTAWA -- So now we have a new mission statement from Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft. He once famously proclaimed his goal was to put a computer on every desktop.
Tuesday, before a gathering of several hundred business managers, lawyers and financial specialists, Gates talked about developing vaccines for the world's "top 20 diseases." HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C and malaria headed his list and he speculated the job could be done within "10 to 15 years."
Gates is backing his words with money, lots of it, through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that manages the vast bulk of his nearly $30 billion U.S. in donations.
On Tuesday he contributed 20 per cent of a $139 million Cdn program aimed at developing HIV/AIDS vaccines for poor countries. The federal government will pick up 80 per cent of the cost.
Since June, when Gates said he would leave his day-to-day job as Microsoft chairman in July 2008 to work full-time for the foundation, he has clearly been doing a lot of thinking about how to apply business to his new role.
The big question is whether his experience as a software entrepreneur has equipped him to be good at it. The brutally competitive computer industry, with its relatively short product development cycles, is hugely different from the world of vaccines and philanthropy.
Gates's good friend Warren Buffett -- who is contributing more than $30 billion U.S. to the Gates Foundation over the next 20 years -- acknowledged as much in a recent interview with Fortune magazine. "The feedback on philanthropy is very slow and that would bother me," he said.
"In philanthropy, also, you have to make some big mistakes. Bill and Melinda will have a better batting average than I would," he added in explanation of why he wasn't taking on the job himself.
Certainly, Gates brings enthusiasm to the job. Buffett noted that his friend has been reading "thousands of pages annually" to keep up with medical advances. The crash course in biotech was evident at Tuesday's meetings in Ottawa. Gates referred to biotech and software as the globe's "two most dynamic industries," growing animated as he outlined one of his foundation's key missions --to develop low-cost drugs for the poor.
The foundation's focus, he explained, was global health, "not rich country diseases." It's not an original notion. But what's interesting is the speed of Gates's learning in biotech and where it's leading him.
As Microsoft founder, CEO, then chairman, Gates was so consumed by computing and software that he barely noticed the rest of the world until the mid-1990s. His wife Melinda showed him an article about dying children in Africa -- which moved him to inquire what was being done in terms of research. The answer shocked him: very little.
When his foundation donated $50 million U.S. in 1999 to combat malaria, he was surprised to learn he had just doubled the amount of money available from the private sector to fight the disease.
The obvious conclusion: the market system had failed profoundly. Poor countries had no money, so drugs were neither developed nor purchased. The Gates Foundation moved into the void and, in effect, became the market. It would pay for R&D and medicine.
The foundation is doing so through various partnerships such as the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization. Earlier this month, the foundation contributed $50 million U.S. to a five-country consortium that is investing $1.5 billion U.S. to develop a vaccine to prevent pneumococcal disease. (Canada contributed $200 million U.S.).
Gates is also lining up pharmaceutical companies such as Britain's GlaxoSmithKline to help develop the vaccines. At first blush, this would appear to offer direct competition to potential blockbuster vaccines now under development at companies such as California-based Gilead Sciences (HIV/ AIDS drugs and Tamiflu, the bird flu remedy) and Vertex Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge, Massachusetts (Hepatitis C vaccine).
However, Gates appears to have something much more targeted in mind for poorer countries. "Anything that will save a life for less than $1,000," is how he characterized the types of medicines his foundation will help to develop.
In part, this will be done by tweaking drugs now under development in the West, for use in poorer countries. For example, the foundation has financed trials for an anti-HIV drug based on a platform developed by Gilead to fight chronic hepatitis B.
But the entrepreneur in Gates seems willing also to finance entirely new classes of medicine.
Will Gates have the patience to see things through? Gates certainly recognizes he is dealing with long time horizons in biotech. For instance, scientists at Vertex began designing their anti-hepatitis drug in earnest 10 years ago and the company is still in phase II clinical trials -- perhaps years away from finally receiving approval for sale.
Gates Tuesday suggested he has long understood the need for strategic research, even at Microsoft. He pointed out that his company started R&D a decade ago on how to send television signals over the Internet -- an effort that is only now beginning to pay off. Speech recognition technology, he added, has yet to mature even though Microsoft has been developing it for more than 10 years.
Gates, at 51, appears reasonably comfortable with biotech's exorbitant demands, which include time and complexity. Less surprisingly, he is also fine with the sheer hubris of the assignment he is handing the foundation that bears his name -- to find a cure for everything viral and save millions of lives.
- Bagnall writes for the Ottawa Citizen.
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