Gates Foundation Pushing AIDS Vaccine

The billions of dollars thrown at global health problems by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are changing the game in drug discovery and posing big challenges to the world's top drugmaker's profit model. The power of the Gates Foundation was bolstered last year when Warren Buffett signed over much of his fortune to the organization, uniting the world's two richest people in a bid to fight disease, reduce poverty and improve education.

A $287 million grants program announced last July — creating an international network of 16 labs to try new approaches to making a vaccine against AIDS — exemplifies the ground-breaking approach pioneered by the foundation. It aims to transform the so-far unsuccessful AIDS vaccine effort by rewarding individual labs that come up with innovative ideas and helping them develop those ideas, while also ensuring they collaborate with rivals.

To get quick results, the new Collaboration for AIDS Vaccine Discovery may need to access and use patented compounds still under development at pharmaceutical and biotech firms. That will raises fresh debate over the ethics surrounding patents on life-saving AIDS drugs and vaccines — of which there are more than 200 in development.
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