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GSK’s Andrew Witty on the Future of Pharma Collaboration to Help Poor Countries
Just before the all-singing, all-dancing launch of the big initiative to control or eliminate 10 neglected diseases – starring 13 CEOs from Big Pharma, the WHO's director general, Margaret Chan, and Bill Gates – I grabbed a few words with Sir Andrew Witty, head of GlaxoSmithKline, who co-chaired the negotiations over the past year with Gates.
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- Health Care
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Venturing into Growth Industries with High-Impact Capital
23rd in a series of excerpts from the book "The HIP Investor" (John Wiley & Sons, 2010). See other published articles in the series here ( bit.ly/gSJMtU ). How do impact investors spur long-term innovation? Through garage startups, which can also be sexy. That’s where William Hewlett and David Packard originated what’s now known as HP, or Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ). Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin followed in that tradition ...
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- Health Care
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Green Businesses in Developing World Get $60M Boost, Along With Microfinance
The International Finance Corp. (IFC), a member of the World Bank group, is launching a $60 million equity financing mechanism to "promote homegrown green innovation in developing countries while encouraging the transfer of clean technologies from developed countries to developing countries." The Cleantech Innovation Facility will help small, highly innovative start-up companies that offer products or services that mitigate carbon emissions. It will n...
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- Health Care
- Region
- Latin America
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Malaria Scientist Celebrates Success After 24 Years
For Joe Cohen, a GlaxoSmithKline research scientist who has spent 24 years trying to create the world's first malaria vaccine, Tuesday, October 18, 2011 goes down as a fabulous day.
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- Energy, Health Care
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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- solar
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Chotuwash, and More
The Godrej Group is walking the talk on ’Good and Green’, its brand campaign. If the low-cost refrigerator ChotuKool that runs on both battery and electricity created a buzz because of innovation (how much of it translated into actual sales is not known as yet), the Godrej Group is already ready for more. While ChotuKool is gearing up for national distribution through the postal system, in the pipeline are a slew of products targeted at the bottom of the pyramid. For examp...
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- Health Care
- Region
- South Asia
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Green Growth
THE enrichment of previously poor countries is the most inspiring development of our time. It is also worrying. The environment is already under strain. What will happen when the global population rises from 7 billion today to 9.3 billion in 2050, as demographers expect, and a growing proportion of these people can afford goods that were once reserved for the elite? Can the planet support so much economic activity? Many policymakers adopt a top-down and Western-centric approach to such ...
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- Education, Health Care
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Bolivia’s First Crop Insurance Scheme Promises to Empower Farmers
Natural disasters can come with six-digit figures of damage and debt attached, even in Latin America’s poorest country. Bolivia ’s rural areas, still dependent on rain cycles, are the most financially vulnerable to drought, frost, hail, floods and other weather adversities. Lose your crops, farmers say, and you’re left with nothing but your debts. Luis Alvaro Toledo, who’s wo...
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- Health Care
- Region
- Latin America
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- nutrition
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Exploding Malaria With Human-Sized Microwaves
Around the world almost a million people die from malaria each year, and half the planet's population, 3.3 billion people, live at risk of contracting the disease , mostly in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Treatments for malaria, however, have never been a high priority for pharmaceutical companies. Most victims have little or no ability to pay, and profit margins on vaccines are thin. Now, our few lines of defen...
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- Health Care
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa