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Alumni gets $46 million Grant from Gates Foundation
 San Francisco's Institute for OneWorld Health, a nonprofit drug company, announced a $46 million grant Tuesday from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a novel treatment for diarrhea, which kills 2 million children a year in the developing world.
The institute said it has enlisted scientists at UCSF, drug chemists in England and cholera doctors in Bangladesh in a collaborative "social entrepreneurial" approach to drug discovery.
It's the latest in a string of hefty Gates Foundation grants for OneWorld Health, whose founder and CEO, Victoria Hale (Grad Division 1990), a UCSF-trained pharmaceutical chemist and former Genentech employee, won an unrestricted $500,000 MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in September.
Earlier Gates Foundation awards, totaling $101 million, were for projects involving black fever and malaria. The new grant, the largest yet, targets the sort of life-threatening fluid loss that can kill a young child in a few hours when left untreated.
As with any early-stage drug discovery effort, no one can judge the project's chances, and it may take a decade before any product is widely available.
The $46 million is enough to finance 6 1/2 years of preclinical studies and small proof-of-concept testing in humans, OneWorld Health program director Susan Wilson said Tuesday. After that, assuming success, other drugmakers might be brought in to take a product to market.
About 2 million children under age 5 die every year of acute diarrhea in the developing countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Standard treatment is oral rehydration.
OneWorld Health hopes its program yields a companion treatment, perhaps a low-cost medication that can be manufactured in bulk and mixed at bedsides into the fluids already administered to sick children. The idea would be to build up the victim's defenses against the deadly diarrheal symptoms, buying time for the underlying infections to clear. Other strategies, such as antibiotics, raise problems of cost and growing resistance to widely used drugs.
The project stems from seven years of research by Dr. Alan Verkman and colleagues at UCSF, who have been studying the molecular pores that line the intestinal tract and airways. Defects in these pores can jam them open in the walls of the gut, causing diarrhea. On the other hand, the pores locked into a closed position can lead to cystic fibrosis in the respiratory system.
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