Neglected Tropical Disease (NTD) Vaccine Research and Development ('the Antipoverty Vaccines')
As President of the Sabin Vaccine Institute and Director of its product development partnership (PDP) Hotez leads an international team of scientists working to develop vaccines to combat hookworm infection, schistosomiasis, and other infectious and neglected diseases, including Chagas disease, leishmaniasis, and SARS. These diseases are the most common infections of the world’s poorest people.
Together with Philip K. Russell, Hotez founded the Human Hookworm Vaccine Initiative (HHVI) in 1999, the first initiative of the Sabin Vaccine Institute PDP. Innovations developed by Sabin Vaccine Development—funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and others—are sometimes referred to as “antipoverty vaccines” because of their impact on both global health and economic development. Antipoverty vaccines against hookworm are now in clinical trials in Brazil, while a new vaccine for schistosomiasis will soon undergo clinical testing. The vaccines for Chagas disease, leishmaniasis, and SARS are at an earlier stage of development, with support from the NIAID, NIH, Carlos Slim Health Institute, Southwest Electric Energy Medical Research Institute, and key individuals.
The Sabin Vaccine Institute PDP develops new antipoverty vaccines jointly with innovative developing countries, such as Brazil and Mexico, with aspirations to extend these activities to the Middle East and Asia. Hotez writes extensively about vaccine diplomacy, i.e., the opportunity of using vaccines as instruments of foreign policy and to promote global peace, especially among poor countries seeking nuclear weapons technology..
Read more about this topic: Peter Hotez
Famous quotes containing the words neglected, tropical, disease, research and/or development:
“A soiled baby, with a neglected nose, cannot be conscientiously regarded as a thing of beauty.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Physical force has no value, where there is nothing else. Snow in snow-banks, fire in volcanoes and solfataras is cheap. The luxury of ice is in tropical countries, and midsummer days. The luxury of fire is, to have a little on our hearth; and of electricity, not the volleys of the charged cloud, but the manageable stream on the battery-wires. So of spirit, or energy; the rests or remains of it in the civil and moral man, are worth all the cannibals in the Pacific.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The inconveniences and horrors of the pox are perfectly well known to every one; but still the disease flourishes and spreads. Several million people were killed in a recent war and half the world ruined; but we all busily go on in courses that make another event of the same sort inevitable. Experientia docet? Experientia doesn’t.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?” [Was will das Weib?]”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“I’ve always been impressed by the different paths babies take in their physical development on the way to walking. It’s rare to see a behavior that starts out with such wide natural variation, yet becomes so uniform after only a few months.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)