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September 28, 2008)
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By LINDA A. JOHNSON, AP Business WriterWed Sep 24, 3:59 PM ET
Drugmaker Pfizer Inc. is working with the founder of Nobel Peace Prize-winning Bangladeshi microlender Grameen Bank to improve health care delivery — and eventually boost sales of its drugs — in poor countries.
The project will work with the bank's affiliated health care system, Grameen Health, which runs a decade-old network of 38 primary care clinics in rural Bangladesh, Pfizer said Wednesday.
The goal is to improve the care the clinics give and set up a sustainable system to provide basic health insurance with some drug coverage to clients who borrow small amounts of money from Grameen Bank.
"We know a lot of the time they're not able to pay the loan back because of health reasons," said Dr. Ponni Subbiah, head of Pfizer's global access program.
Grameen Bank's 25-year-old program is credited with helping lift millions out of poverty by making tiny loans, averaging $200, so people who don't qualify for traditional commercial loans can start a small business by buying farm animals, raw materials to make a product or cell phones to rent out, for example.
Pfizer experts it will work with Grameen to develop a system that would take a small amount from each client's loan to pay for basic care and some medicines at those clinics.
Pfizer, the world's biggest drug company, will help develop a list of essential medicines, from antibiotics to HIV drugs, and will provide drugs it makes at low cost to the clinics; other drugmakers also may eventually do so.
In the first year, Pfizer will invest $1 million in the project, including $200,000 for administration. It will rotate its experts in areas such as medicine, finance and public health communications through Grameen Health's central office to find ways to better serve clinic patients. Those might include using telemedicine to get consultations in complex cases and sending mobile health vehicles to serve rural residents who can't travel to a clinic.
The partners hope to replicate the program in other countries.
"The Pfizer mission is to work together for a healthy world," said Jean-Michel Halfon, head of Pfizer's pharmaceutical operations in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Canada. He said the partnership also is meant to bring future business to Pfizer, given that the market for pharmaceuticals in developing countries, now $30 billion a year, is expected to double within five years.
Those drugs now mainly are provided by charities such as UNICEF and other institutional buyers or are paid for by patients because their governments can spend little on health care.
Mohammed Yunus, who shared the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize with the bank he founded, said Pfizer "shares our belief that solutions to improving access to medicines and health care can be socially responsible and sustainable, yet commercially viable."
Virologists have a new weapon in the war against viruses – a way to tag and track individual viruses that are too small to be viewed with light microscopes.
To infect a cell, viruses have to subvert the cell's proteins in order to survive and replicate inside. But working out exactly how the viruses do that is difficult because they are so small. Most are 10 to 300 nanometres across.
Pin Wang and colleagues at the University of Southern California have come up with a way to track individual viruses. "That is a powerful tool for investigating viral infection routes," he told New Scientist.
Until now only one group of viruses – the lentiviruses, which include
Wang's team says that quantum dots, a kind of nanoscale crystal, can track a larger variety of viruses.
Quantum dots are just a
Wang's team labelled HIV-1 viruses by attaching them to molecules of biotin (vitamin B7), which in turn connects to a protein coated onto the quantum dots.
To check this method didn't affect the quantum dots' shine or the way viruses behave, the team simultaneously tracked HIV-1 particles using quantum dots, and GFP.
They found that the viruses labelled with quantum dots infected cells as readily as unlabelled viruses.
Wang says that quantum dots could be used to track a much wider range of viruses, including those that can't be followed using GFP.
"We believe that many kinds of enveloped viruses could be labelled by our method," he says.
Although some viruses can be labelled using dye molecules, the dyes are quickly bleached by the powerful light of microscopes and so the viruses can't be tracked for any length of time. By contrast, quantum dots retain their brightness for several hours.
"Some studies show that quantum dot-labelled proteins could be detected in living cells even after 48 hours," Wang adds.
Maxime Dahan at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris is impressed with the study.
"It unquestionably represents a significant result in terms of using quantum dots as virus markers," he says. "It holds great promise to unravel the infection pathway in a detailed manner."
Journal reference: ACS Nano, DOI: 10.1021/nn8002136