Baylor's National School of Tropical Medicine... includes as its research arm a... product development partnership (PDP). There are 16 PDPs worldwide... international nonprofit organizations that develop and manufacture s—drugs, diagnostics, and vaccines—for NTDs, as well as for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis (TB), and malaria. Together, the NTDs, Tb, and malaria are sometimes broadly defined as "neglected diseases." PDPs develop and test new products for neglected diseases that the major pharmaceutical companies may not have an interest in because they are poverty-related afflictions that will therefor not generate significant sales income. The National School of Tropical Medicine's PDP is known as the PDP, and it is specifically focused on developing NTD vaccines.
American vaccinologist
(born 5 May 1958) is an American scientist, pediatrician, and advocate in the fields of , vaccinology, and neglected tropical disease control. He serves as founding dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology & Microbiology at , where he is also Director of the Center for Vaccine Development and Texas Children’s Hospital Endowed Chair in Tropical Pediatrics. Hotez served previously as President of the and is a founding Editor-in-Chief of . He is also the co-director of Parasites Without Borders, a global nonprofit organization with a focus on those suffering from parasitic diseases in subtropical environments.
From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Alternative Names:
Peter J Hotez
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Peter Hotez
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P. J. Hotez
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P J Hotez
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P. Hotez
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P Hotez
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Hotez P
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Hotez P.
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Hotez P. J.
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Hotez PJ
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Peter Jay Hotez
From Wikidata (CC0)
In 2011, together with a team of 15 scientists, I relocated to Houston, Texas, to launch a new school devoted to poverty-related diseases. The National School of Tropical Medicine at is a joint venture among three biomedical institutions—Baylor, , and the —with a mission devoted to research on and training in the treatment of neglected tropical diseases, or NTDs...
In 2006, I became founding editor in chief of PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, a then new journal for a growing community of scientists and public health officials committed to studying the (NTDs). ...I became deeply impressed with the number of papers reporting on disease findings in middle-income countries, and even in some high-income countries. This... combined with my personal experiences after moving to Texas and seeing first-hand the endemic tropical diseases, inspired me to look more deeply into the health disparities of the poor who live in the midst of wealth. ...Many of the findings in this book are based on data and information published in [the journal].
We invite scientists from all over the world to come into our vaccine labs to learn how to make vaccines under a quality umbrella, whereas you cannot walk into Merck or GSK or Pfizer or Moderna and say, “Show me how to make a vaccine.” With our group, we can.... the biggest frustration was never really getting that support from the G7 countries... I going on cable news networks... trying to raise meager funds just to get started... fortunately, we were able to get some funding through Texas- and New York-based philanthropies, and...we raised about...$7 million...with that, we were able to pay our scientists to actually do this, transfer the technology, no patent, no strings attached, to India, now, as I said, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Botswana... we’ve been getting calls for help all over the world from ministries of science and ministries of health, and we do what we can. We could do a lot — I mean, if we had even a fraction of the support that, say, Moderna or the other pharma companies had gotten, who knows? We might have been able to have the whole world vaccinated by now.... It’s even a vegan vaccine... So, now our partners in Indonesia... are trying to do this as a halal vaccine for Muslim-majority countries, which is pretty exciting, as well.
The reason why we have this situation now with Omicron... is we allowed large unvaccinated populations in low- and middle-income countries to remain unvaccinated. Delta arose out of an unvaccinated population in India in early 2021, and Omicron out of a large unvaccinated population on the African continent later in the same year. So, these two variants of concern represent failures, failures by global leaders to work with sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America to vaccinate the Southern Hemisphere, vaccinate the Global South.... myself...Dr. Bottazzi... and our team of 20 scientists... make vaccines for diseases that the pharma companies won’t make... the only thing we know how to do is make low-cost, straightforward vaccines for use in resource-poor settings... it was very difficult to get funding. We got no support from Operation Warp Speed, no support really from the G7 countries... now we’ve licensed our prototype vaccine, and help in the co-development, to India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and now Botswana.... it’s really exciting to show that, you know, you don’t need to be a multinational pharmaceutical company and just make brand-new technologies that will only be suitable for the Northern Hemisphere. We can really make a vaccine for the world.