Harvard malaria researcher Dyann Wirth talks about the impact of the Gates Foundation on public health research, what else is needed for global health efforts, and what it’s like doing field research in Africa.

Corie Lok

Last month, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded $18 million to the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center for AIDS vaccine research. This is just one example of how Boston-area research has over the last decade benefited from the foundation (see related Datapoints).

Dyann Wirth of the Harvard School of Public Health and director of the Harvard Malaria Initiative has seen and experienced the changes in the world of public health research brought on by the Gates Foundation. _Nature Network Boston _ met up with Wirth to talk about the Gates Foundation and what the next steps should be in fighting killer infectious diseases.

What impact has the Gates Foundation had on global health research?

DW: They’ve changed the dynamic of the field. They are one of the biggest philanthropic supporters in, for example, malaria research, and so it does shape how people think about the field. One example is the Grand Challenges in Global Health [a $436 million initiative launched by the Gates Foundation, with the National Institutes of Health, to focus and fund high-risk research on seven broad technologies]. The goal there was to step back and take a new look at how to approach problems and to encourage researchers to think outside the box. And I think the Grand Challenges certainly attracted some new people into the field.

Another example is the Medicines for Malaria Venture [a nonprofit organization aiming to develop and distribute new malaria drugs by bringing together the public and private sectors], which has collaborations with industry that were nonexistent before. The major companies, both in the pharmaceutical and more recently in the biotech industry, have begun to enter this field in a significant way, in part because of the Gates funding. Perhaps not only because of the funding, but it certainly enables GlaxoSmithKline, for example, to develop a malaria vaccine because the work, at least in part, is supported by the Gates Foundation through the Malaria Vaccine Initiative.

What needs to happen next? We can’t rely on foundations or these initiatives to eventually manufacture and distribute new treatments.

DW: Certainly government is going to have to step up, both developed world and developing world governments. Perhaps the poorest countries in Africa won’t have the resources to do this, but countries like India, China, and Brazil, which are countries well along the path of development, are places where one can look to get capabilities and, to some extent, finances when it’s in their national interest. Many of these diseases remain endemic or epidemic in these countries. But the richest countries in the world are going to need to make investments too.

You do field work in Africa. What’s that like?

DW: The most active project we have is in Senegal, where we’re looking at the spread of malaria drug resistance and trying to find ways to identify where resistant strains are emerging and to predict when to change antimalarials. This may go a long way to increasing the useful lifetime of antimalaria drugs.

Teams from my lab spend the rainy season—September to December—in Senegal, and researchers from Senegal are here in the nonrainy season to receive advanced lab-based training that they then bring back. The students from Senegal are very well educated in basic science, but they need the kind of training that’s routine for our students here.

How often do you go to Senegal?

DW: I’m there probably every three or four months.

What’s it like going back and forth between Senegal and Boston?

DW: The labs we work with in Dakar at Cheikh Anta Diop University have many of the same technologies that we have here. Over the years that we’ve been working with them, there’s been a lot of technology transfer so that most of the experiments can be conducted equally well at both sites.

Is there any kind of culture shock when the Senegalese students come here or the U.S. students go there?

DW: There are things that surprise U.S. students when they go to Senegal, ranging from how sophisticated the labs are to how challenging it can be to work in a health-care system in a resource-poor setting.

Why is it important to work overseas?

DW: It’s critically important to study a disease like malaria in its natural setting. An important determinant of disease pathogenesis is the interaction of host and parasite populations, and that can only be studied in the natural environment.