More than Government Grants

Entrepreneurial ingenuity focuses on finding money and ideas to advance medical science

To lift the burden of infectious diseases in poor nations, Harvard University economist Michael Kremer has advocated a kind of artificial market for vaccines. In Kremer's scheme, a donor country or institution would commit to paying a certain sum for the development of a vaccine and would purchase it at a high price per dose. After that, the company would supply the vaccine to poor countries at a low price. The Group of Seven nations has asked for a pilot proposal from the World Bank that would test Kremer's suggestion for vaccinations against a trial disease.

Kremer's approach is one of many that have marshaled unprecedented creativity to chart new paths for medical research. A different attempt is the brainchild of Scott Johnson, a 50-year-old former businessman who is waging a personal battle against multiple sclerosis. His Myelin Repair Foundation, established in 2003, has persuaded five of the field's top university researchers to merge their laboratories and create a more businesslike plan for developing treatments, with patents from any discoveries controlled by the foundation. "Before we started this, if you asked how long it would be until we found myelin drug targets, it would have been 15 years," Johnson says. "With this process it may be five years."

Similarly, four leading cancer centers have linked efforts to coordinate clinical trials, share resources and pool their findings on a deadly bone disease: multiple myeloma, a blood cancer that erodes bones and kills quickly. Leading the project is Kathy Giusti, a pharmaceutical executive who learned that she had multiple myeloma in 1996. A graduate of Harvard Business School, Giusti set up the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation, which has raised $60 million for research.

Christiane N¿sslein-Volhard, a pioneering geneticist and co-winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, has taken perhaps the most personal approach. With her own money and a $100,000 award from Unesco-L'Oreal's Women in Science Program, she has launched a foundation in her own name that offers grants to young female scientists to pay for baby-sitters and household help. "We try to find the gifted ones," she says, "where it would be a real pity if they dropped out. We say: use these funds to buy yourself time away from household matters."

Warren E. Buffett's innovation may be the most surprising of all. In what Fortune magazine described as "typical Buffet: rational, original, breaking the mold of how extremely rich people donate money," the world's second richest man is giving away 85 percent of his wealth, most of it to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In an open letter to the couple, Buffett wrote of his admiration for what the foundation is accomplishing and his desire to "materially expand its future capabilities. . . . Both of you have applied truly unusual intelligence, energy and heart to improving the lives of millions of fellow humans who have not been as lucky as the three of us." The example of Buffet and Bill and Melinda Gates is inspiring other top executives and research professionals to bring their imaginations to bear on conducting the business of research.-- Michelle Press

On the Road to Green

Chemists and automakers mark progress toward environmentally benign fuels and vehicles

Motorists have heard a lot lately about ethanol-based fuels, which burn cleaner than gasoline and derive from renewable, domestic biomass. Iogen Corporation, a Canadian biotech firm, has blazed a novel path to production of ethanol-based fuels. Rather than converting relatively high-priced farm crops, researchers there decided to focus on making ethanol by transforming the tough, sugar-bearing cellulose in low-cost agricultural residues and waste. Iogen has pioneered fuels from cellulosic ethanol by developing enzymes that can extract the sugars from wheat and barley straw. The company is running the world's first and only demonstration "biorefinery" that can convert as much as 40 tons per day of straw into cellulosic ethanol.