Hale, Victoria

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Hale, Victoria

Chemist and pharmaceutical executive

B orn c. 1961, in Maryland; daughter of government employees; married Ahvie Herskowitz (a cardiologist). Education: University of Maryland, B.S., 1983; University of California—San Francisco, Ph.D., 1990.

Addresses: Office—Institute for OneWorld Health, 50 California St., Ste. 500, San Francisco, CA 94111.

Career

C linical trial research associate, Johns Hopkins Hospital oncology center, c. 1983-85; senior reviewer, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 1990-94; research scientist, Genentech Inc., 1994-97; co-founder,Axiom Biomedical Inc., 1999; chief scientific officer, Axiom Biomedical Inc., 1999-2000; founder, Institute for OneWorld Health, 2000; chairperson and chief executive officer, Institute for OneWorld Health, 2000—; adjunct associate professor of biop-harmaceutical sciences, University of California— San Francisco, 2002; advisor, World Health Organization (WHO); expert reviewer, National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Awards: Executive of the Year, Esquire magazine, 2005; award for social entrepreneurship, Skoll Foundation, 2005; fellow, Ashoka Innovators for the Public, 2006; MacArthur Fellow, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, 2006.

Sidelights

V ictoria Hale is the founder of the Institute for OneWorld Health, an innovative new nonprofit pharmaceutical company that strives to bring life-saving drugs to the developing world. Based in San Francisco, OneWorld Health is the first such firm of its type in the United States, and has the potential to prevent millions of needless deaths. Hale was inspired to launch her visionary project in part from a joke a cab driver once made when she told him she was a pharmaceutical scientist. “You guys have all the money,” she recalled him saying, and Hale realized he had a point, she told Fast Company’s Alison Overholt. “Our industry does have all the money. We decide which drugs to make—and it’s always about the profit margin. I decided right there that it would have to be me that separated profit from the scientific process of deciding which drugs are to move forward.”

Born in the early 1960s, Hale was the first of three daughters in her family, and grew up in suburban Washington, D.C. Both of her parents worked for the federal government, and she recalled that her interest in medicine was sparked at an early age from her own medical issues. “I had been a sickly child with a lot of ear and sinus infections,” she told New York Times reporter Elizabeth Olson. “Relief came from the antibiotics I was given, and I wanted to do for other people what my pharmacist did for me.”

Hale earned her undergraduate degree in pharmacy from the University of Maryland in 1983, then worked for two years at Johns Hopkins Hospital, one of the country’s most prestigious medical centers for both teaching and treatment. In its oncology center she worked on clinical trials for new drugs, which spurred her to continue her education at the University of California’s doctoral program in phar-maceutical chemistry in San Francisco. She earned her Ph.D. in 1990 and was hired by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a senior reviewer for new drug applications.

The world’s major drug companies spend millions of dollars every year searching for new or improved cures for diseases and chronic conditions, but firms like Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Merck are for-profit enterprises. This means that their research and development spending is lavished on drugs with the highest profit potential, because conducting the large-scale clinical trials necessary to gain approval from the FDAand regulatory agencies in other parts of the world is a costly and lengthy process. As a result, many new innovative drug treatments that come onto the market are usually ones with millions of potential customers, such as medicines for heart disease and arthritis sufferers. Once a drug is approved, the company that introduced it is granted a patent for a specified period of time—usually ten years—to recoup their investment in research and development. Global giants like Pfizer and Glaxo-SmithKline do have divisions that work on drugs for other kinds of diseases that affect people in the developing world, but generally less than ten percent of the company’s entire research budget is spent on such endeavors.

From 1994 to 1997 Hale was a research scientist with Genentech Inc., a San Francisco Bay-area company that pioneered biotech drugs such as the first syn-thetically produced insulin for diabetes sufferers. She and her husband, a cardiologist, founded their own consulting firm in the late 1990s to support themselves as well as fund the future nonprofit firm that Hale was hoping to launch. They were inspired in part by friends of theirs who asked for help in researching possible drug remedies for their 13year-old daughter who had been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer that affects just a few thousand Americans every year. Hale and her husband learned that there was a promising drug for it, but it was still in the laboratory stage and had never moved on to the large-scale drug trial required for FDA approval. Hale knew from her own work experience that there were many other potential treatment breakthroughs for other diseases, but there were so few sufferers that companies did not consider it feasible to begin the patent-application and clinical-safety trial processes.

Hale founded the Institute for OneWorld Health in San Francisco in 2000, serving as its chairperson and chief executive officer. Its mission is to identify a disease, then ask companies that have already conducted research to donate those proprietary findings to OneWorld Health; because Hale’s venture is a nonprofit, the companies then receive a tax write-off for their generosity. She then searches for grant money or outright donations to help bring the drug to the market. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is one of the most generous supporters of One-World Health, and both the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the World Health Organization (WHO) also help by running clinical trials.

The first drug that OneWorld Health developed was paromomycin, a treatment for visceral leishmania-sis, which affects 1.5 million sufferers around the world in places like India’s impoverished Bihar state. In 2006, just after India’s government approved paromomycin for use, Hale was given one of the genius grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. More formally called the MacArthur Foundation fellowships, the annual awards bestow $500,000 on U.S. scientists, musicians, artists, or others who are deemed to have the potential to make a difference in the world. By then OneWorld Health was already working on its next projects: a treatment for Chagas disease, which kills 50,000 annually in Central and South America; an anti-diarrheal potion that could prove a lifesaver to millions of children in the developing world; and artemisinin, a miracle malaria cure from an herb known for centuries in China and made from the sweet wormwood plant, but too expensive to produce in large amounts. OneWorld Health was working with researchers to come up with a cost-effective way to genetically engineer artemisinin by tricking bacteria cells into producing it in the lab.

As Hale noted in an article she wrote for Newsweek, industry professionals have been generous and supportive of OneWorld Health and its goals. “That’s been enormously gratifying, of course, but not surprising,” she reflected. “Most pharmaceutical researchers got into the business because they wanted to ease suffering and save lives. Systems may be flawed, but most people want to do the right thing. All they need—all any of us need—is to create a path.”