Lo que Gates piensa de la industria...

Most of what Bill Gates said to me over the course of two interviews found its way into the cover profile of him I wrote for the most recent issue of Forbes. But one set of ideas didn’t really make it: his unique and thoughtful perspective on the pharmaceuticals industry.

Few outsiders have had as clear a view of the drug business as Gates. Over the past decade, Gates has relied on giants like Merck, Pfizer, and Sanofi-Aventis to provide the vaccines that are a lynchpin of his charitable work. He’s had a long-standing collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline over a malaria vaccine. The Bill & Melinda GatesFoundation recruited its last research head, Tachi Yamada, from Glaxo, where he had headed drug R&D. During his tenure, Yamada helped the Gates Foundation develop a meningitis vaccine from scratch to help people in parts of Africa. Yamada’s replacement, Trevor Mundel, hails from Novartis, where he ran clinical trials – a sign that some industry insiders say means that the Gates Foundation may be heading even further into the development of new vaccines and drugs.

After a conversation with Gates, one wonders if the drug industry has hurt itself by focusing too much on $100,000 cancer drugs and blockbuster pills that can be sold to millions, and not enough on products that are far more cost-effective. And then, of course, there’s the fact that the entire $600 billion pharmaceutical industry has spent the past decade in a research drought, getting comparatively few new medicines to market.

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