Former NIH chief spotlights 'most powerful force' for health funding

On the first day of the United Nations General Assembly’s high-level week, Dr. Elias Zerhouni — former director of the National Institutes of Health under U.S. President George W. Bush’s administration — said he’s “optimistic” that the dire situation currently engulfing global health funding can be reversed. “The most powerful force is actually patients,” he told Devex President and Editor-in-Chief Raj Kumar. “Human beings talking and saying, ‘This is what's happening at the human level, not at the institutional level.’ It's not the NIH that's suffering. It’s millions of people suffering. You have to make that a reality.” He pointed out that the U.S. Congress refused to reduce NIH’s budget recently, crediting that to patient groups. Still, he acknowledged that the current state of global health funding is indeed a problem, with “a tremendous amount of misinformation” coupled with resentment from wealthy countries, ballooning defense budgets, and powerful players “forgetting that this is an ecosystem” and that global health in one country affects that in another. Add to that, he said, the threat of high taxation for philanthropies, attacks on universities, and venture capitalists in biotech with little appetite for the risks inherent in developing new drugs and therapies. One bright spot, according to Zerhouni? Artificial intelligence. When it comes to Alzheimer's disease diagnoses, he said, “the number one thing that would change the discussion would be digital biomarkers on your iPhone, detecting whether or not you have a mild cognitive deficiency early, right? That's cheap. … [But] you don’t get paid for that, right? Same thing for blood tests and so on.” “So I think the scaling and the timing needs to be bigger on the scale, faster on the time,” he said, “AI will be key to that. Key to that. There's no doubt in my mind.” Technology aside, he told Kumar that “coming together is the most important thing. … There is a little bit of selfishness that we need to eliminate.” “Then we can sit down and figure out, technically, what needs to be done,” he said. “But at the end of the day, it's not just a question of money. It's a question of values. … We're one planet, one world.”