Victoria Hale is the founder of OneWorld Health, a nonprofit pharmaceutical company. The first of its kind in the U.S., OneWorld’s mission is to develop safe, effective, and affordable medicines for those most in need through collaboration with other pharmaceutical companies, governmental and non-governmental agencies, hospitals, and universities.

Hale is a MacArthur Genius Fellow, Ashoka Fellow, Ph.D. chemist, and – until very recently – the CEO of OneWorld. She recently handed off the day-to-day operations, but she’s staying on the board of directors and will undoubtedly stay involved.

OneWorld’s most stunning achievement to date is paromomycin, an antibiotic. Set to be manufactured and distributed in India, paromomycin could save thousands of lives a year. OneWorld’s next plan to impact the planet: making inexpensive production of mass amounts of malaria drugs a reality.

OneWorld can and does find cures, often for diseases that big pharma isn’t interested in and doesn’t find profitable. What they have a problem with is drug distribution. This isn’t new – NextBillion guest blogger and author Nick Sullivan reported it from last year’s Harvard Social Enterprise conference – and it’s a problem that affects all drug companies, not just OneWorld.

So what to do about it? Distribution problems are often about infrastructure, but one way to get around that infrastructure problem is with a good business model. Perhaps Hale would be interested in HealthStore and its CFW Shops in Kenya, or in Mi Farmacita’s 80 franchised pharmacies in Mexico. OneWorld Health may not be the best organization to do the distribution, but what franchising teaches us (at least in healthcare) is that they don’t have to be. Let the nurses and the businessmen do the work.

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Jay Keasling is the personification of creative destruction.  Keasling is an award-winning scientist and the developer of an ultra low-cost source of artemisinin, the active ingredient in anti-malarial drugs.  His company, Amyris Biotechnologies, engineers microbes that produce artemisinin at $0.25 per dose – down from $2.40 today.

So how is Keasling the personification of creative destruction?  If you’re an artemisinin producer, Keasling’s success is going to put you out of business.  And if you’re Acumen Fund – a lead investor in Advanced Bio-Extracts, an artemisinin producer – Keasling changes the return on investment equation.

Of course, creative destruction doesn’t happen tomorrow.  ABE has a solid future, and the need for artemisinin far outstrips the supply and will for the foreseeable future.  So Jacqueline Novogratz doesn’t have to worry – at least not yet.

Why can ABE and Amyris co-exist?  Frankly, the scale of the problem (malaria) makes it possible.  The following are excerpts from an excellent article written by Lynn Yaris of the Lawrence Berkeley Lab:

According to the World Health Organization, each year nearly 500 million people living in the tropics and subtropics become infected with malaria, suffering burning fever and severe pain. An estimated one to three million victims die, most of them children.

Medical researchers have been unable to stamp out malaria, but effective antimalarial drugs have been discovered. The best of these is artemisinin and its derivatives, which are nearly 100 percent effective against all known strains of malaria. Artemisinin releases high doses of oxygen-based free radicals that destroy the Plasmodium parasite while it is inside a red blood cell. More than a million malaria patients have already been cured by artemisinin. But the cost of extracting the drug from wormwood trees, which only produce artemisinin under a narrow set of agricultural and climatological conditions, or of manufacturing it entirely through chemical synthesis, is so high that the impoverished populations suffering the most cannot afford it.

Keasling can chemically synthesize artemisinin. He feeds microbes sugar, and the microbes produce the drug - of course, it's way more complicated than that, a fact that Keasling makes light of in his presentation.

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