Episode 78 •
8 September 2024
Jacob Trefethen on Global Health R&D
Contents
Jacob Trefethen oversees Open Philanthropy’s science and science policy programs. He was a Henry Fellow at Harvard University, and has a B.A. from the University of Cambridge.
He tweets as @jacobtref and blogs about science at blog.jacobtrefethen.com.
In this episode we talk about:
- Life-saving health technologies which probably won’t exist in 5 years (without a concerted effort). Such as:
- A widely available TB vaccine
- A widely available vaccine for Strep A
- Bugs and which stop malaria spreading, like a fungus which appears to block the transmission of the malaria parasite
- ‘Monoclonal antibodies’ for malaria, which trigger immunity faster than vaccines
- How R&D for neglected diseases works —
- How much does the world spend on R&D for neglected diseases?
- What is Gavi (the Vaccine Alliance)?
- How do drugs for neglected diseases go from design to distribution?
- Public-private ‘product development partnerships’
- No-brainer policy ideas for speeding up global health R&D —
- An FDA program which speeds up drug development for neglected diseases at ~zero cost to the taxpayer (and why more researchers should know about it)
- Why the FDA should consider sharing un-redacted assessments with other countries
- How to make vaccine procurement more predictable (and why that matters)
- Why congress should definitely renew PEPFAR
- Comparing health R&D to public health interventions (like bed nets)
- Comparing the social returns to frontier (‘Progress Studies’) to global health R&D
- Why is there no GiveWell-equivalent for global health R&D?
- ‘Vigilante accountability projects’ and why you should consider doing one
- Won’t AI do all the R&D for us soon?
Resources
- Open Philanthropy page on Scientific Research
- Open Philanthropy page on Global Health R&D
- 10 technologies that won’t exist in 5 years (blog post by Jacob)
- 10 U.S. policy ideas for 10 lifesaving technologies (blog post by Jacob)
Jacob’s recommendations
Let us know if we missed any resources and we’ll add them.
Transcript
Coming soon!
Note that this transcript will be machine-generated, by a model which makes frequent mistakes and sometimes hallucinates entire sentences. Please check with the original audio before using this transcript to quote our guest.