Health innovation pipeline ‘more robust’ than ever, says Gates Ventures

The pipeline for global health innovations is “more robust than it’s ever been,” according to Niranjan Bose, who is managing director of the health and life sciences strategy at Gates Ventures. This includes innovations in areas such as vaccines, drugs, diagnostics, and tools to measure the performance of health systems. “Continued investment in getting those pipelines to market is one thing that we should not lose sight on, but the pipeline is one that I'm very optimistic about,” he said, while on stage at Devex’s flagship event in Washington, D.C. “Scaling the fantastic pipeline innovations is truly the challenge we're going to face.” Gates Ventures is Bill Gates' private office that works to complement the Gates Foundation’s work in global health. One of its key projects is Exemplars in Global Health, which is an international research collaboration that identifies positive health outliers, studies successes, and shares findings. In resource-limited settings, as development aid tapers down and countries face debt crises, these types of innovations are crucial but Bose said he’s optimistic. “The donor community is engaging more so than ever in trying to find the best practices, the best ways to deploy,” he said. One area Gates Ventures has worked to innovate is solutions for diagnosing Alzheimer's disease — which is a hard problem to solve because it’s not easy to take samples from the brain. But they're working on a blood test that Bose said will be ready next year. The test checks for amyloid accumulation, which is a proxy for Alzheimer's disease. This makes an Alzheimer’s diagnosis more accessible than if someone needs to have a complex PET scan. The important role that philanthropies play in the global health innovation space is that they can take on more financial risk than others, such as a shareholder company, helping bring these innovations to market, Bose said. “I think we need funding to come from all sources because our risk appetite is not going to be the same across the board,” he said.