• Background
• 2005 Summit
• 2006 Summit
• 2007 Summit
• 2008 Summit
• 2009 Summit
• 2010 Summit

Background

In early 2004, Lee Hartwell, President of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and George F. Russell, Jr., then-Chairman of The National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR), William H. Gates, Sr., co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Michael Birt, then-Director of NBR's Center for Health and Aging, sketched out a vision for how emerging science and technology could link with global health policy to transform healthcare. They brainstormed on the need to prevent, detect, and treat illness early enough to drastically reduce the human and financial cost of disease, an intensely personal issue for each of them. From those discussions emerged the initial plan to organize and host the Pacific Health Summit.

With that vision in mind, George Russell and Bill Gates, Sr. took on the combined role of co-chairs of the Summit’s advisory group and provided the seed funding for the Pacific Health Summit. Building on this initial foundation of leadership, the Summit has grown into one of the world's premier global health gatherings every year.

The Summit is co-presented by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, and The National Bureau of Asian Research, which has served as the Summit’s secretariat since its founding.

2005 Summit

The inaugural Pacific Health Summit was convened by two co-sponsoring organizations, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and The National Bureau of Asian Research's (NBR) Center for Health and Aging. The 2005 Summit addressed four conceptual building blocks for early health: the assessment of health risk, the prevention of disease, early detection of disease, and early treatment of disease. Over the course of three days, top-level leaders from science, policy, public health, medicine, and industry met to discuss the urgent need to create an early health approach to global health in the 21st century. Participants were drawn from almost 20 countries and engaged in a lively dialogue.

2006 Summit

In June 2006, the Pacific Health Summit continued its focus on emerging science and technology and its intersection with health policy, particularly in the area of “early health”—and the value of early detection and intervention. The 2006 Summit produced a call for a follow-up meeting to bring together diverse voices to discuss pandemic influenza vaccines. In January 2007, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the Center for Health and Aging at The National Bureau of Asian Research co-presented a workshop in Beijing titled “Pandemic Influenza Vaccines: Building a Platform for Global Collaboration.” That workshop, in addition to serving as a dress rehearsal for the June 2007 Summit, supported collaborative national and regional efforts for disease detection and prevention programs based on scalable technology platforms for a public health strategy aimed at prevention and preparedness.

2007 Summit

In June 2007, the Pacific Health Summit addressed the topic of pandemic preparedness and prevention. This interest dates back to the inaugural Pacific Health Summit in June 2005, when Jong-wook Lee, the then-Director-General of the World Health Organization, eloquently and passionately addressed the need for greater attention on the threat of a global avian influenza pandemic. Participants at the 2007 Summit gathered for three days of discussion and debate focusing on avian influenza and other threatening communicable and non-communicable diseases. Special emphasis was placed on the issue of developing and stockpiling pre-pandemic H5N1 vaccines. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation officially joined as the third co-presenting organization in 2007.

2008 Summit

In 2008, our theme was "The Global Nutrition Challenge," focusing on the complex challenge of too little of the right nutrition for vulnerable populations and the rapidly emerging health threat of too much of the wrong nutrition in both developed and developing societies. One key theme addressed in all Summit discussions surrounded the special challenge of ensuring a “healthy start” for children by focusing on maternal and infant nutrition. The agenda and content for the June 2008 Summit was supported by two advance workshops. The first workshop titled, “Undernutrition: Creating New Responses,” was held in February 2008 and addressed the critical issue of global undernutrition, focusing in particular on hoped-for new engagement by Japan in this field. The second workshop titled, “Obesity, Associated Diseases, and Personal Health: Addressing the Global Nutrition Challenge,” was held in April 2008 and addressed the critical issue of obesity and associated diseases. Key action points agreements from both meetings fed directly into the 2008 Pacific Health Summit process. The Wellcome Trust officially joined as the fourth co-presenting organization in 2008.

2009 Summit

In 2009, our Summit theme was “MDR-TB: Overcoming Global Resistance.” The Summit brought together top leaders to tackle how science, industry, and policy can accelerate the uptake of innovation to address this emerging global health threat. Over the course of two days, participants explored ways to strengthen existing approaches to basic TB control and MDR-TB management, and break through existing bottlenecks around technology development and treatment implementation in both developed and developing country health systems.

2010 Summit

The 2010 Pacific Health Summit will address the theme of maternal and newborn health (MNH), integrating key outcomes from a series of important MNH meetings preceding the Summit in June. Challenges to keeping mothers and babies healthy come from many directions; path-breaking solutions must connect key players from every point of the compass. Unless leaders from science, industry, and policy coalesce around this theme, the growing burden of maternal and newborn ill-health will lead to irreversible, unprecedented loss across the developed and developing worlds. The cost of leaving these challenges unattended is great, but the opportunities to create a positive turning point in MNH exponentially greater.

Rather than a “technical” meeting, the Summit’s unique role is to gather a highly diverse group of key leaders from science, industry, and policy in an interactive, moderated discussion of a critical topic in global health. Our goal is to forge new alliances and provide a launching pad for innovation and collaboration that will result in a healthier world. For more information on the 2010 Summit focus, please visit here.

The Summit logo expresses the timelessness of the human hope for better health. The character chosen to represent the Pacific Health Summit, pronounced sheng in Chinese and ikiru in Japanese, means “life” or “to live.” The Summit logo is a character that is simple and clean in meaning, yet powerful in scope. In the same way that this character for “life” also combines easily with other characters to build hopeful and strong compounds, we too hope the Pacific Health Summit will become a cornerstone upon which to build partnerships and collaborations.

Click on logos to learn more.