In 2003, Lee Hartwell (Director of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Co-Chair of the Summit Steering Committee) met with George Russell (Chairman of the Russell Family Foundation and NBR) and sketched out a vision of how emerging science and technology could link with global health policy to prevent, detect, and treat illness early enough to drastically reduce the human and financial cost of disease. Mr. Russell then passed this vision on to his colleagues at NBR and William H. Gates, Sr. (co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), and as a result they committed their organizations to becoming the founding organizations of the Pacific Health Summit.

Since the Summit’s conception, directors of the co-founding organizations and the co-chairs of the Steering Committee recognized that along with this exciting vision come enormous challenges. Indeed, such a transformation in health can only be achieved through an ongoing multi-year process combined with high-level global collaboration, and not simply through an annual event.

Funding for the Pacific Health Summit has come from a variety of foundation, industry, and government sources. Seed funding for the Summit was provided by the founding organizations—The Russell Family Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—which continue to provide annual support. The U.S. National Cancer Institute has provided financial support for the first three Summits in the form of contributions to the direct expenses incurred at the Pacific Health Summit. In addition, we have benefitted from strong financial and organizational support from industry leaders such as GE Healthcare, Microsoft, Intel, Coca-Cola, Pfizer, GSK, Merck, Roche, Amgen, Fujitsu, Affymetrix, Virginia Mason Medical Center, and Swedish Medical Center.

In June 2005, the inaugural Pacific Health Summit was convened by two co-sponsoring organizations, the Hutchinson Center and the Center for Health and Aging of The National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR), which acts as the official secretariat for the Summit. 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.

Featured participants included: J.W. Lee (Director-General, WHO), Elias Zerhouni (Director, National Institutes of Health), Andrew von Eschenbach (current Commisioner, FDA), Koji Omi (former Minister of Finance, Japan), William Castell (current Chairman, Wellcome Trust), Craig Mundie (Senior Vice President, Microsoft), Dakui Yin (Director, Chinese Medical Doctor's Association), and Louis Burns (President, Digital Health, Intel).

In June 2006, the Pacific Health Summit continued its discussion of early health and how to connect science and policy for a healthier world. We welcomed back many of our participants and featured such leaders as Lee Hood (President, Institute for Systems Biology), Zuojun Jiang (Vice Minister, Ministry of Health, China), Tadataka Yamada (President, Global Health, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), William Brody (President, Johns Hopkins University), Vartan Gregorian (President, Carnegie Corporation), and Yu Wang, Director, Chinese CDC).

In June 2007, the Pacific Health Summit addressed the topic of pandemic preparedness and prevention. Participants gathered for two 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 H5N1 vaccines. Featured participants included: Margaret Chan (Director-General, World Health Organization), Zhu Chen (Minister, Ministry of Health, China and former Vice President, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Sally Davies (Director-General, Research and Development, UK Department of Health and National Health Service), Victor Dzau (President, Duke University Medical Center and Health System), Julio Frenk (Senior Fellow, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and former Minister, Minister of Health, Mexico), Joe Hogan (President, GE Healthcare), Craig Mundie (Senior Vice President, Microsoft), and Andrew Von Eschenbach (Commissioner, U.S. Food and Drug Administration).

In 2008, our theme will be "The Global Nutrition Challenge." We will tackle the complex challenge of too little of the right nutrition for vulnerable populations, the rapidly emerging health threat of too much of the wrong nutrition in both developed and developing societies, and the continuum between them.

The character chosen to represent the Pacific Health Summit in our logo, 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. While scientific collaborations are among the first steps to be taken, we also seek to form partnerships around policy, medical practice, technology, and public health initiatives.

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