World-transforming partnerships - The Star - 0 views
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Ross Wallace, director of strategic partnerships at the MarS Centre, which brings together scientists, entrepreneurs and investors, has seen a lot of P3s at their best.
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Wallace was as baffled as everybody else. But he believed a business model could be created that would connect medical discoveries coming out of universities and government labs with the money available from private foundations.A year ago, he won one of six fellowships offered by the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation to young people eager to tackle global problems. His research led in an unexpected – and welcome – direction. It turned out that he didn't have to invent a new business model. One already existed."I found some really exciting collaboration going on," he said. "A new breed of partnerships had emerged that completely transformed the development and delivery of pharmaceuticals for neglected diseases."
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So Wallace redefined his task. He would look for ways to bolster these fledgling P3s.They have a very short history. The first grew out of a program launched by the World Bank in 1999 to pull together money and talent for research on tropical diseases. But it remained buried within the global bureaucracy.
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These innovative P3s have produced a "paradigm shift" in the behaviour of pharmaceutical executives, Wallace says. Companies such as GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Sanofi-Aventis and Novartis have instituted a no-profit, no-loss formula for work on neglected diseases.
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The laggards are governments, including Canada's. Not only do they offer little financial backing to these pioneering P3s, they don't seem to want to get involved. "I kept looking for CIDA (the Canadian International Development Agency) but I didn't see as much as I was hoping to," Wallace says.His fellowship is now over, but Wallace remains a man on a mission.He'll tell anyone who will listen that public-private partnerships can change the world. They've already begun.