Pop!Tech - Victoria Hale's One World Health Needs Franchising

Rob Katz — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 11:26:44 -0400

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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Pop!Tech - Victoria Hale's One World Health Needs Franchising