Borderline Bandits

\Borderline Bandits

by gatekeepers
Tue 15 May 2007

Washington has its Beltway Bandits. Seattle now has its own kind of (Canadian) Borderline Bandits benefiting from proximity to the Foundation.

Seattle is reaping the benefits of having the world's largest health foundation in its backyard. Eric Sorensen gauges the impact.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation aims to address the most pressing public-health issues around the planet. And in its search for solutions, especially to diseases affecting the poorest people, the world's wealthiest foundation is spending a lot of money close to its Seattle home.

The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, which last year received $40 million in Gates funding for work on an HIV vaccine, is within walking distance of the foundation's office on Eastlake Avenue. The University of Washington, home of a new global-health department started with $30 million in Gates funding and recipient of another $10 million for AIDS vaccine work, is 10 minutes away on the 70 bus.

The non-profit Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH) has received $850 million in Gates funding over a dozen years. Its new and already bulging office building is in Seattle's Ballard neighbourhood, a kayak paddle down Lake Union's ship canal. The Seattle Biomedical Research Institute (SBRI) has received Gates grants totalling nearly $45 million. Its benefactor will soon be even closer: in 2010, the Gates Foundation is due to move into a new 56,000-square-metre headquarters close to the nearby Space Needle tower.

The local funding recognizes Seattle's growing research prowess, particularly in health problems such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, and in innovative technological solutions. More than half the Gates donations go into global health, with 15% spent in the Seattle area. Global-health researchers around Seattle have received more than $1 billion since Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his wife Melinda started the foundation in 1994. And investment in the region is likely to increase. A $30-billion pledge from investor Warren Buffett last year doubled the foundation's size, so staffing will follow. As the foundation grows, it plans to make its involvement in its current issues "deeper and not broader", according to Melinda Gates.

"The effect of the Buffett gift is now beginning to be felt," says Jack Faris, a former spokesman for the foundation who is now president of the Washington Biotechnology and Biomedical Association.

Key collaborations

"The Seattle area has the capacity to highly effectively collaborate worldwide on complex, important contemporary problems and projects," says Jim Gore, the SBRI's chief operating officer. "Every position, from leadership to all our scientific career levels, we expect to see expand locally and we expect to stimulate growth through our collaborators. I don't think there is a job classification that will be left behind."

Faris and others say the foundation's tapping of local expertise is anything but parochial, as global-health research has been part of the Seattle fabric for decades. The SBRI began studying malaria parasites here 30 years ago and PATH has been around nearly as long. The 'Hutch', as the Hutchinson Center is often called, is a leader not only in cancer research but also in the study of HIV/AIDS and other diseases that compromise the immune system. This has led the Hutch to become the coordinating site for many national and international studies, such as the Women's Health Initiative and the HIV Vaccine Trials Network. The University of Washington is also a notable player, housing the Center for AIDS and STD since 1989.

The region's life-sciences and health researchers have a history of collaboration. This may stem from the city's distance from competitive places such as New York, says Chris Elias, PATH president, or maybe it's what he calls the "Northwest spirit". Whatever the cause, when researchers from the university and from a local biotechnology company needed a Biosafety Level 3 facility, the SBRI provided space and time. "That's the kind of sharing they would not be doing in many places that are hotly competing," says Elias.

Developing solutions

The rapidly increasing number of biotech firms and researchers bring other benefits too. They can collectively push for key policies such as better public education, and the availability of jobs makes it easier to hire researchers with spouses who also work. "The bigger the community gets, the easier it gets to recruit," Elias says.

For PATH, this means high-tech solutions for the low-tech developing world with its poor transport, patchy refrigeration and weak health infrastructure. Not only does it work on low-cost vaccines for malaria and meningitis, it is also working on ways to improve access to vaccines for other conditions, such as hepatitis B.

Until about five years ago, there was usually about a 20-year gap between the United States and the developing world getting access to a vaccine, says Teresa Guillien, a spokeswoman for PATH, which is trying to close that gap. In 2005, PATH got a Gates grant of $107.6 million to work with GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals to complete testing and licensing of the most advanced potential vaccine for malaria.

Gates has also helped fund several products at PATH including single-use, self-disabling syringes, an inexpensive dipstick to test for HIV antibodies and vitamin-fortified rice. A PATH group, led by bioengineer Paul Yager of the University of Washington and working with a local diagnostics company called Micronics as well as other firms, is helping develop a credit-card-sized micro lab that can quickly diagnose blood or stool samples for diseases that cause fever. One of two PATH 'lab on a card' projects, it was among 43 chosen from 1,500 responses to the foundation's Grand Challenges to improve global health in 2003. PATH officials see numerous opportunities for multidisciplinary projects that involve technical work, commercialization, public-health expertise and even industrial design.

In Seattle's South Lake Union area, the SBRI has two recipients of Grand Challenges grants totalling $32.5 million. Parasitologist Stefan Kappe is working on mosquitoes to genetically attenuate the Plasmodium falciparum parasite, which spreads malaria. Patrick Duffy is researching children's immune responses, to learn why some suffer so much more severely than others from malaria. He is also working on a vaccine to block the protein that helps the parasite bond to the placenta and rob the fetus of nutrition.

Rapid expansion

"The number and scope of laboratories in the Pacific Northwest conducting research on global health has expanded substantially over the past five years, and will continue to do so in the near term," says Duffy, crediting Gates support and the other funding it has catalysed. "The Gates Foundation itself seems to be on a growth trajectory so there may be new opportunities in analysis, policy and programme management at the foundation."

Duffy has seen the SBRI branch out, with its project managers helping to translate discoveries into products and providing opportunities for people who achieved success in biotech companies and now want to go into non-profit areas. "This is a great opportunity for them in the Seattle area and elsewhere," Duffy says.

Julie McElrath, a Hutchinson researcher, is lead investigator on a $30-million grant to study ways to enhance the cellular immune response generated by HIV vaccines. She talks about the need for scientists who have moved into business, earning either a law degree or MBA, and has seen many staff scientists come from industry. "They understand what it takes to develop a product better than a standard research scientist," she says. "They understand how to work with milestones."

Complex skill sets are needed to meet the Gates Foundation's requirement that researchers share data and collaborate in real time. Its new $287-million HIV/AIDS consortium, for example, has 165 researchers working in 16 teams. Analysing much of its data is Steven Self, head of the Hutchinson Center's Statistical Center for HIV/AIDS Research and Prevention. Self and his colleagues are leading a project to create a repository of statistical data on vaccine candidates being tested within the research network.

The network is likely to produce a wealth of connections and collaborations "that otherwise might never be made", he says. This creates opportunities for database statisticians, mathematical modellers thinking about dynamical systems, and statisticians focused on complex, multidimensional immunological data.

"There are not just more positions of the usual sort," says Self. "There is a wider variety of positions that we're looking for, to solve a wider variety of problems." These are some of the biggest problems in the world and, with support from the Gates Foundation, Seattle is helping to look for innovative solutions.

Eric Sorensen is a science writer based in Seattle.