Chiron Corp. signed an innovative deal last week that could set a pattern for how corporations and nonprofits can work together to develop medicines for Third World diseases.
The Emeryville biotech firm gave New York's Global Alliance for TB Drug Development the rights to develop a promising experimental compound called nitroimidazopan. It's been 30 years since there's been a new anti-TB drug and scientists have high hopes that the Chiron compound will be a breakthrough.
The Alliance has upwards of $40 million in funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Gates Foundation and other sources. It will use those funds to carry out animal tests and, if all goes well, human clinical trials of the anti-TB drug. If it works, the Alliance will be free to sell the drug, without any patent restriction or royalty fees, in Third World nations where TB kills 2 million people a year.
Chiron wins something in return. If the Alliance proves the anti-TB medicine safe and effective, Chiron can buy back the rights to sell a higher priced version in the developed world. The Alliance will still be free to sell the cheap version abroad.
"It's one of those rare win-win situations," said Craig Wheeler, president of Chiron's biopharmaceutical division.
He explained how the deal came about. The anti-TB drug was one of the experimental compounds that Chiron obtained when it acquired the Seattle biotech firm PathoGenesis in August 2000. Chiron decided the TB market wasn't large enough, in dollar terms, to warrant the costs of clinical development and decided to see if some other firm wanted to buy the rights. About this time the Alliance contacted Chiron and expressed interest in developing the drug. The Alliance is a story in itself. It is one of a handful of nonprofits that have arisen in recent years in an attempt to do what the market system can't -- develop cheap medicines for the Third World.
The Alliance is overseen by a board that includes health officials from the United States and South Africa, a past president of Medecins Sans Frontieres, and drug industry executives, including Chiron CEO Sean Lance.
The Alliance recently hired former National Institutes of Health official Dr. Maria Freire to run the operation. Rather than build a drug development company, the Alliance will contract out the clinical work.
Development of the anti-TB drug is at a very early stage. It will be a couple of years before the Alliance finishes the preclinical studies that would be a prelude to human trials. And the drug could fail at any stage, as happens all the time.
So while it's a bit early to celebrate, I find this deal incredibly uplifting. The free market is a powerful mechanism but it has one and only one end -- the production of profits. It depresses me to think of all the other needs that get ignored because of the market's single-minded focus.
What a deal like this tells me is that biotech leaders, international health officials and philanthropic groups are trying to create mechanisms to address needs that would otherwise fall through the cracks.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed, both for the TB drug and the larger experiment in nonprofit drug development.