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Wednesday, December 10, 2003
Seattle is becoming a new center for global health research
A buzzing horde of malaria-infected mosquitoes is looking for blood on the south side of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, across the water from Fremont.
It's a sign of what's to come.
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 | Mike Urban / P-I | |
| Dr. Patrick Duffy of the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute, with one of his favorite research subjects, a malaria-infected mosquito. Thanks to Bill Gates, Duffy and his colleagues moved here to launch what is fast becoming one of the world's top labs for a malaria vaccine. | ||
Scientists brought the mosquitoes and their deadly parasites to Seattle from Tanzania. They breed in a little-known laboratory that has quickly grown into the largest malaria-research facility west of the Mississippi.
The lab sprang up here because of Bill Gates.
The world's richest man is on a quest to immunize the children of developing nations -- and one of the biggest weapons in that fight would be a vaccine against malaria, a disease that claims up to 3 million lives a year.
"We know a malaria vaccine is possible," said Dr. Patrick Duffy, who leads the project at the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute.
In one of its first forays into global health, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave $5 million to Seattle Biomedical in 1999 to set up the lab. The money allowed the small non-profit to recruit Duffy, a world-renowned malaria expert, from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. Since then, Duffy's team has swelled to 30 researchers -- and there are plans to triple the staff soon.
It is just one example of how Gates is quietly seeding this city's fertile biomedical landscape, creating a new world center for global health science and policy.
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Geneva is the World Health Organization's home base. New York City is headquarters for UNICEF. Atlanta hosts the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Seattle now ranks among them.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has funneled nearly $500 million into global health research here over the past four years. With beneficiaries ranging from the University of Washington to small biotech labs, the trend is hailed by business leaders as a potential boon to a regional economy hammered by the shrinking work force at The Boeing Co. and the dot-com collapse.
A half-mile west of Duffy's lab, just north of the Ballard Bridge, is the headquarters of the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health, or PATH. For decades, the non-profit struggled to promote its innovations -- aimed at improving public health in the Third World -- on a shoestring. budget.
Today, PATH has emerged as a pivotal player in Gates' plan to stem the global disease death toll by bankrolling a massive immunization drive and the hunt for desperately needed vaccines. The organization runs more than a dozen Gates-funded health projects in 70 countries with a combined budget of nearly $400 million, and it plays key roles in many others.
"We're witnessing the birth of a new field," said Rick Klausner, former director of the National Cancer Institute who now heads the Gates Foundation's multibillion-dollar health program. "Whatever direction the new endeavor of global health science takes, it is pretty clear that Seattle will be at the epicenter of it."
Gates, the Microsoft Corp. chairman, is relying heavily on science and technology.
Working with the National Institutes of Health, Gates recently launched a worldwide competition for $200 million in research "challenge" grants, hoping to entice scientists into tackling the planet's biggest health problems. It is modeled after a similar gambit a century ago by mathematician David Hilbert, who identified the 23 biggest problems facing the field and challenged his colleagues to answer them. The solutions that resulted transformed mathematics.
Long before he turned his attention to global health, Gates helped finance Seattle biotechnology companies. He is a major shareholder in some, including Icos Corp. and Corixa Corp. Gates and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who has invested $400 million into turning South Lake Union into a biotech hub, share an enthusiasm for the promise of biotech and talk about it frequently.
Gates recognizes that industry needs to be a part of his global health game plan, said Corixa's chief executive, Steve Gillis.
"Somebody has to make the vaccines," Gillis said.
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The Gates Foundation doesn't fund industry directly, preferring to stimulate innovation through non-profit research organizations, such as PATH and Seattle Biomedical.
Corixa scientists are working with their own non-profit affiliate, the Infectious Disease Research Institute, on a $15 million Gates grant to develop a vaccine against leishmaniasis -- a parasitic disease that kills 500,000 people a year in the developing world.
On the academic front, Gates' contributions to biotech have helped set the stage for his global health crusade.
It started in 1991, when Gates donated $12 million to the University of Washington to bring in Leroy Hood, the scientist credited with pioneering the computerized genetic-sequencing machines used in the Human Genome Project. Hood's arrival put Seattle on the map for that hot scientific field and drew in other big guns in genomics.
This year, Gates gave $70 million to the UW to build a new genome sciences center -- requiring that $10 million be dedicated to research that will benefit developing nations.
UW President Lee Huntsman said Gates' support of local biomedical research and Allen's biotech development is already stimulating Seattle's high-tech economy. Add Gates' apparent desire to make the city a global health headquarters, Huntsman said, and it's hard not to get excited.
Business leaders agree.
John Rindlaub, chief executive for Wells Fargo Bank's Pacific Northwest division, and Safeco Chief Executive Michael McGavick recently cited expanding global health-related research and development as a key factor in the region's economic growth.
While Gates' seed money is vital, he is really capitalizing on existing strengths. The UW and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center are already among the nation's top public and private recipients of research grants from the National Institutes of Health. Biomedical research and health care is one of this region's top industries.
The UW has long been a world leader in the study of infectious disease and also has a strong faculty tradition of public-health activism. Fred Hutchinson's main mission is cancer, but its other two divisions are focused on public health and basic science. The cancer center runs the National Institutes of Health's largest international AIDS-vaccine research project.
PATH and Seattle Biomedical have been in Seattle since the late 1970s, drawn here in part because of the area's reputation as a
biomedical research center.
"There are all these converging streams of interests and activities that put Seattle in a unique position to be the center of what Gates wants to do," said Hood, who now runs the Institute for Systems Biology at the north end of Lake Union.
Said Corixa's Gillis: "Seattle does seem to be headed toward becoming a nexus for global health."
To further that end, Klausner at the Gates Foundation meets regularly with the region's leading biomedical scientists, encouraging them to take the initiative and direct more of their talents toward improving global health. He has formed a group called Puget Sound Partners for Global Health.
"One of Rick's goals is to stimulate more global health research in this community," said Fred Hutchinson President Lee Hartwell, a member of the new group.
Last year, the Gates Foundation gave the cancer center $2.5 million to begin funding
scientists who propose research projects aimed at addressing specific health problems in the developing world.
It's not a lot of money compared with other Gates grants. But that is how the foundation likes to do things -- giving a little bit at first to see what happens. If it get the right results, more money often follows.
That's what happened for PATH. That's what Duffy and his colleagues at Seattle Biomedical hope for as well, as they seek to expand even further.
Seattle Biomedical has used the $5 million from Gates to raise the additional capital needed to build a state-of-the-art research facility. Located in the South Lake Union neighborhood and co-owned by Allen, the building should be completed early next year.
Standing in the existing malaria lab, in front of mosquito-filled buckets covered with gauze, Duffy explained how his team was aiding the global search for an effective vaccine.
You can't simply grow a malaria parasite in a lab like you might a virus or bacterium, he said. These bugs are much more complex and go through several stages in their life cycle that require reproducing them -- as happens in nature -- using mosquitoes and rats.
The scientists dissect the salivary glands of the mosquitoes to obtain the mature parasites.
"Can you imagine trying to do surgery on
a mosquito's spit gland?" Duffy said with
a chuckle.
They are looking for the proteins that provide protection against malaria. Using sophisticated equipment that Hood's team helped set up, the researchers smash the proteins into fragments and analyze the broken peptides --
organic compounds -- to identify their structure.
The goal is to find the protein, or group of proteins, that can stimulate the immune system to attack the malaria parasite while it's confined to the liver.
"Some pregnant women in Tanzania appear to make these proteins," Duffy said.
Seattle Biomedical has built a clinical research center in Muheza, Tanzania, to study this phenomenon -- and prepare for the day when they can test a vaccine. Tanzanian scientists now regularly come to Seattle for training and to exchange information.
Ken Stuart, who founded Seattle Biomedical in 1976 and is still its director, spent years struggling to find enough funding to do research on diseases of the Third World.
"There were few champions for these problems," Stuart said.
Now, thanks to Gates, Stuart hopes to be able to expand again -- to 100 researchers.
He's thinking big, he said, because Gates wants everyone in the Seattle scientific community to think big.
"This," Stuart predicted, "is going to be huge."
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PART ONE:
Becoming parents gave world's richest couple a new mission in life
Life in a Delhi slum: 'We are always in God's hands'
PART TWO:
It takes more than a billionaire's money to make a difference
In India, progress has been stunning
In Cambodia, results have been mixed
A preventable disease shatters ambitions
Every year, birds bring fear -- and danger -- to a village
PART THREE:
Seattle is becoming a new center for global health research
Gates Foundation is creating markets for drug innovators
Health pioneer PATH putting ideas into practice
Gateses inspiring others, counters 'defeatist mentality,' doctor says
Dispensing Hope
Science and health reporter Tom Paulson and photographer Mike Urban previously visited Gates-funded programs in Africa and reported their findings in a P-I series published in 2001.
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