Virginia Commonwealth University has received an additional $19 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to finance its groundbreaking work to rebuild medicines with cheaper ingredients.
The new funding represents a vote of confidence from a philanthropic giant that rarely funds the same organization twice, said Frank Gupton, CEO of VCU’s Medicines for All Institute. He said the renewal is an affirmation that his organization delivered on its promises.
“The past five years have shown we’re dramatically reducing the cost of these global health drugs in ways people haven’t done in the past,” Gupton said.
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Medicines for All was created in 2017 when VCU received its first $25 million from the Gates Foundation. The idea was to expand work seldom done in the pharmaceutical industry — rebuilding medicines and making them more accessible.
When it effectively redesigns a drug, VCU does not patent the new formula. It does the opposite, giving it away for free.
Now, Medicines for All, a subset of the College of Engineering, has received more than $60 million in grants and worked on 22 different drugs. Nine out of every 10 HIV patients will use a treatment developed by the VCU organization.
Its staff has grown to about 65 employees, who occupy space in the Bio+Tech Park on the northern edge of downtown. Its new grant from the Gates Foundation is a five-year commitment and will help fund work on HIV, tuberculosis, COVID-19, malaria and possibly cancer.
When the pandemic struck, Medicines for All pivoted its focus to COVID-19. It developed a new starting material for the drug remdesivir, which was pivotal in treating COVID-19 during its early stages.
Then it redesigned the COVID-19 pill made by Merck and Ridgeback, called molnupiravir, reducing its cost from $2,000 a kilogram to $200.
Tuberculosis has become epidemic in southeast Asia and parts of Africa. The disease has become resistant to traditional treatments, some of which were designed 50 years ago, Gupton said. Few patients have access to better treatments — the molecule is complicated and expensive to build.
“It’s a real health care issue in Africa and the far east,” Gupton added.
Medicines for All redeveloped the expensive treatment and reduced its cost by 75%, Gupton said. Merck and other companies have partnered with Medicines for All to expand medicine’s reach.
It has also worked to change how drugs arrive in Africa. Most are made outside the continent and shipped in, Gupton said. Medicines for All is working with a South African chemical manufacturer and the U.S. Agency for International Development to begin manufacturing HIV drug components in Africa, something that has never done before.
If Africans can buy drugs built within the continent, they can save a great deal of money.
“We’re really changing the whole paradigm behind how the supply chain works on a global basis,” Gupton said.
Locally, Medicines for All has teamed up with other drug manufacturers in the Richmond area, forming a coalition called the Alliance for Building Better Medicine.
Civica Inc. recently built a plant in Petersburg that will begin production on low-cost insulin. Phlow Corp. won a federal contract in 2020 to rebuild the nation’s stockpile of essential drugs. And AMPAC Fine Chemicals produces some of the building blocks for drugs.