Bridging The Gap
From lab to village
Life-saving interventions like bed nets need to be disseminated widely and at low cost.
Improving health for the poor depends on nurturing local innovations and learning how to deliver them, argue Abdallah Daar and Peter Singer. In the 1980s and 1990s the world's life sciences researchers were largely ignoring the poor, with genomics, for example, mostly confined to sophisticated labs in the rich world. We argue that the life sciences revolution is now ushering in a new era of better and less expensive drugs, vaccines and diagnostics. [1] The prospect of improving health is greatest in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), and the hope is that a child born in a poor country will have the same life expectancy as a child born in a rich country. We are already seeing these efforts bear fruit. Take malaria, for example: a vaccine is due to be deployed by 2016. And at a biological level, researchers are studying genetic profiles to understand why some children get cerebral malaria and die while others don't. This is just one of many applications of life sciences in global health. But there are ethical, social and commercial challenges in taking life-saving science from the lab to the village to those most in need of these innovations. The sustainable solutions to these obstacles are homegrown, where the lab is closest to the village. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Grand Challenges in Global Health programme, launched in 2003, began with 14 'critical barriers' to solving (mainly infectious) health problems in the developing world. Subsequent initiatives for research prioritisation have focused on non-communicable diseases, such as the Grand Challenges in Chronic Non-Communicable Diseases, which led to the creation of the Global Alliance for Chronic Disease (GACD) an international alliance of funding bodies to coordinate research on heart disease and stroke, some cancers, respiratory conditions and type 2 diabetes and more recently the Grand Challenges in Global Mental Health initiative.
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