Three health foundations tackle biggest disease threats in $300mn deal

The three largest charitable foundations focused on public health are to join forces for the first time to tackle climate change’s impact, infectious diseases and measures to improve nutrition and wellbeing.

Denmark’s Novo Nordisk Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and UK-based Wellcome will commit an initial total of $300mn over three years and aim to expand their collaboration to other public, private and philanthropic partners. 

The co-operation highlights efforts to harness technological advances in areas such as mRNA vaccines while deepening research and development to deal with big interlinked threats.

“The spirit of the agreement is to improve health equity in the world,” Bill Gates, co-chair of the Gates Foundation, told the Financial Times. “We do a lot of R&D across our [priority] diseases — and now these amazing foundations are also increasing what they do.”

The three-way link up is set to be unveiled on Monday at an event in Helsingør, north of Copenhagen, to mark the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s 100th anniversary. The foundation’s philanthropic firepower has surged thanks to sales of diabetes and weight loss drugs by Novo Nordisk, in which the foundation holds a controlling stake through its subsidiary Novo Holdings. 

While the three philanthropic bodies have co-funded previous initiatives, the first formal agreement between them should help maximise the impact of their resources, said Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen, Novo Nordisk Foundation chief executive.

“There’s always the risk when you fund things that turn out to be overlapping and you don’t harness the full value compared to if you pool resources,” he said. “You don’t want to focus on the same thing in two different places.”

The pact’s goals reflect how disease threats are sometimes exacerbated by other factors such as climate change, conflict and political instability, said John-Arne Røttingen, chief executive of Wellcome.

Climate change risks include waterborne disease outbreaks because of flooding and the spread of tropical maladies as temperatures rise in historically cooler areas.

“As funders based in the global north, it is our role to invest in research that benefits everyone, everywhere,” Røttingen said. “Collaboration is key to accelerating not just research and innovation globally, but also research excellence and capacity where these challenges are greatest.”

The tripartite pact will focus attention on how many of the biggest health dangers in poor countries, such as pathogen resistance to antibiotics, are increasingly global concerns.

In a speech at Monday’s gathering, Gates is expected to underscore the case for making nutrition and gut microbes — known as the microbiome — a leading area of international research. He will argue that it could make a big contribution to halving the almost 5mn annual worldwide deaths of children under five, over the next 20 years or fewer.

“It’s kind of mind-blowing how little research was going into understanding malnourishment,” he said. “In some cases, for things like the microbiome, we had to fund the scientific research because it was just an ignored area.”

He will point to how good digestive system microbe health helps undernourished children improve nutrient absorption, making them better able to fight off diseases such as pneumonia, diarrhoea and malaria. At the same time studies suggest gut inflammation caused by overnutrition, which is helping stoke a global rise in obesity, can increase susceptibility to some metabolic and neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s.

Gates will also warn that R&D into poverty-related diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis is underfunded — and has been falling.