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Segment:1 The London Centre for Neglected Tropical Disease Research with Sir Roy Anderson - Part 1.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Segment:2 Please introduce yourself.
ROY ANDERSON: I'm Roy Anderson. I'm at Imperial College in London in the Faculty of Medicine Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology. I've worked most of my life on the epidemiology and control of infectious diseases, ranging from HIV, foot-and-mouth, BSE, neglected tropical diseases, and a whole pile of vaccine-preventable diseases. And currently I direct a center at Imperial which is a collaboration between a variety of university laboratories in London or the area, the London Center for Neglected Tropical Disease Research.
Segment:3 What is the London Centre for Neglected Tropical Disease Research?.
ROY ANDERSON: It includes London School of Hygiene Tropical Medicine, the Royal Veterinary College, the Natural History Museum, and the Sanger Center. There are a lot of advocacy bodies in neglected tropical diseases. Quite some time ago, 10 years ago, I was asked to chair an advisory committee for the World Health Organization in Geneva. And this was when this group of infections were both all lumped together into neglected tropical diseases.
ROY ANDERSON: And in this basket is a lot of odd things. There's protozoan parasitic infections. There's helminths, worm infections. There's dengue, too, dengue virus, which is a major international problem, and then some other viruses and bacteria. So the objective of this advisory committee in Geneva was to try and focus more attention on how to control them, because interestingly, the treatments existed for quite a few of the infections, effective drugs, for example.
ROY ANDERSON: And the problem was not essentially recognizing what needed to be done. It was implementation in poor regions of the world. Then in 2012, Margaret Chan, who was the director, or still is the director, of WHO till the end of this week, and Bill Gates, and a variety of leaders from the pharmaceutical industry, the CEOs, put together a thing called the London Declaration, which was orchestrated really by Bill Gates.
ROY ANDERSON: Now, the London Center was established at the same time. And its objective was not advocacy or implementation. Its objective is to bring together high-quality research institutes that can make a contribution to solving some of the scientific unknowns for these infections. And they could be diagnostic. They could be better treatments. They could be epidemiological research to understand how they're being transmitted.
ROY ANDERSON: They could be molecular epidemiology, which is whole genome sequencing, working out who infects whom. And that's essentially this broad mix of institutions that are contributing to the center.
Segment:4 Why do you think an interdisciplinary approach is important in helping the NTD field progress.
ROY ANDERSON: Controlling infections in poor countries in the world, there are many aspects to this. There are social aspects. There are attitudes towards taking pills or having a vaccine. There's the usual problems of clean water, sanitation, disposal of feces. And all these, so you've got social, behavioral, and then you've got epidemiological. You've got scientific, and then you've got drug treatment, and then perhaps vaccine development. Probably the most interesting thing is in vaccine development because modern technology platforms for vaccines are very sophisticated now, and probably you could develop a vaccine for all of the NTDs with the right investment.
ROY ANDERSON: The issue is not scientific solution of that problem. The issue is finding an economic and financial model that could take that scientific discovery through development, into manufacturing, and then sale in poor countries. And the financial model is perhaps many hundreds of millions of investment. How would you get that return by selling into a country that perhaps cannot afford to buy these vaccines? So many of the issues are more social, behavioral, and economic rather than scientific.
ROY ANDERSON: [MUSIC PLAYING]
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