More information on outcomes from the 2010 Pacific Health Summit will be available soon.

Chris Viehbacher, CEO of sanofi-aventis, pledged 100 million doses of H5N1 flu vaccine to the WHO for developing countries, furthering the important work of the 2007 Summit. Mel Spigelman, President and CEO of the Global Alliance for Tuberculosis Development announced a partnership for TB drug development with Tibotec, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. Becton, Dickinson and Company teamed up with FIND to offer a price reduction in the cost of liquid culture testing, which FIND CEO Giorgio Roscingo announced. The denial of a U.S. visa for invited Summit speaker Paul Thorn of the Tuberculosis Survival Project in the UK, due to his HIV-positive status, led to the repeal of the U.S. travel ban against HIV positive individuals following efforts on his behalf by U.S. Senator Patty Murray and Representative Jim McDermott. After meeting at the Summit, Jim Allen, Asia Pacific Medical Director, Chevron Corporation invited Patrizia Carlevaro, Head of International Aid Unit, Eli Lilly and Company and her colleagues to speak about MDR-TB at the annual meeting of the MNC Medical Directors’ Council in China, which included participants from IBM, GE, General Motors, Continental, 3M, and Proctor & Gamble. Merck & Co. and Qiagen’s new cervical cancer vaccination partnership, launched publicly in September 2009, originated from the first in-person meeting between Mark Feinberg and Qiagen CEO Peer Schatz in June. Following discussions at the 2009 Summit, the Critical Path to TB Regimens, an unprecedented public-private partnership on TB drug development was announced in 2010.

Tachi Yamada, President of Global Health at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust, announced that they would work together with the food industry to fund the creation of a Nutrition Index. Implemented by GAIN, this initiative examines the contributions of the food and beverage industry to global nutrition. Keizo Takemi, former Japanese Senior Vice Minister of Health, labor and Welfare, described how he and other key Japanese leaders were working to integrate nutrition into the G8 agenda. Inspired by the discussions at the 2008 Summit around the concern that erosion of trust among various stakeholders in the infant feeding area was undermining the scale-up of complementary feeding products for infants, Peter Singer, CEO of Grand Challenges Canada and Director of the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health of the University Health Network and University of Toronto, co-published The Shared Principles of Ethics for Infant and Young Child Nutrition in the Developing World in 2010. Finally, CEOs of major food and beverage companies pledged to support the WHO Action Plan on Diet and Physical Activity.

Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the establishment of a WHO pre-pandemic flu vaccine stockpile. GlaxoSmithKline simultaneously pledged a 50 million-dose donation to the stockpile, and Baxter International, sanofi pasteur, and Omnivest also pledged to contribute to the effort. Eli Lilly revealed the establishment of the “Lilly Not-For-Profit Partnership for TB Early Phase Drug Discover” to fight MDR-TB. Sir William Castell, Chairman of the Wellcome Trust began talking with Mark Feinberg, Vice President for Medical Affairs and Health Policy at Merck & Co at the Summit and realized their organizations’ complimentary interests, resulting in the creation of a $145 million non-profit research institute to be formed in India. This institute, the MSD Wellcome Trust Hilleman Laboratories, will take promising vaccine ideas to the test stage and will optimize or adapt current vaccines so that they are more affordable or usable in lower-income countries.

The first two Summits challenged how we approach healthcare, shifting the focus from a late stage disease model to a focus on prevention, early detection, and early treatment of disease. At the inaugural Summit, Sir William Castell, then President and CEO of GE Healthcare and current Chairman of the Wellcome Trust, announced the Early Health Initiative (EHI), which offered policy-makers a dynamic way to determine cost-effective investments in health promotion. Lee Hartwell, President and Director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (and member of the Summit’s Executive Committee) co-launched the Partnership for Personalized Medicine (PPM), which leveraged the Summit’s distinct commitment to early health, engaging new players and increasing commitment to early health across the globe in tangible ways. NBR, the Summit secretariat, created the Forum for Personal Health to facilitate collaborations between the Summit and PPM, and that initiative catalyzed the 2009 establishment of a new Center for Sustainable Health at Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute, now directed by Michael Birt, Executive Director of the Summit, with Lee Hartwell serving as the Chief Scientist.