GlaxoSmithKline’s CEO Andrew Witty and His Work in Developing Nations: Unsung Heroes

The recent trend of media and Congress to call drug and pharmaceutical companies the “bad guys,” like Wall Street and AIG, only out to make profits and charge the American people high prices for their drugs, is problematic. As one recent story in the New York Times examines, they forget the extremely important contributions drug companies make, and their philanthropic efforts to help the poor.

Andrew Witty, the chief executive of GlaxoSmithKline, the world’s second-largest drug company, recently did interviews  from the slums of Nairobi and rural hospitals in Uganda. As the Times noted, he is not just making a name for himself as a young CEO, “he is also making a name for himself by doing more for the world’s poor than any other leader of a colossus of Big Pharma.”

In his interview, he balanced wanting a successful company with helping the population of Africa, where village hospital beds are filled with “women and babies severely febrile with malaria.” Part of his motivation started “as a Glaxo trainee right out of the University of Nottingham, where he spent 10 years in Africa and Asia.” From this training, he was inspired to change the previous tone of the drug industry who a decade ago, thought “Asia was not worth the trouble of marketing to.”

Mr. Witty’s work in Africa even blossomed into helping Nelson Mandela write the country’s newly elected government’s drug and health care policies. This kind of work continued for the GSK CEO later, by working “in China, India, Myanmar (formerly Burma), Pakistan and Vietnam.”

Since becoming CEO in 2008, Witty has brought GSK to No. 1 “on the Access to Medicine Index created in 2008 by an organization based in the Netherlands that rates pharmaceutical companies on their stances toward the poor much as Transparency International ranks countries on corruption.” Examples of GSK’s work with the poor include:

–    “Cutting deals with drug makers like Dr. Reddy’s in India and Aspen Pharmaceuticals in South Africa to support their new drugs and jointly market Glaxo brands.”

 

–    “Teaching Brazil’s state vaccine company, Fiocruz, how to brew its new pneumococcal vaccine.”

 

–    Telling Harvard medical students in a speech last year, that GSK would keep the prices of all Glaxo drugs in poor countries to no more than 25 percent of what was charged in rich ones, and to donate one-fifth of all profits made in poor countries toward building their health systems.”

 

–    “Building a laboratory in Tres Cantos, Spain, specializing in malaria and neglected diseases. The company put its drugs for neglected diseases into a “patent pool” so researchers can refine them or combine them with those of rivals.”

 

–    Using company executives to help “governments of poor countries and to help form partnerships fighting various diseases.”

 

–    “Since 1998, donating one billion doses of albendazole, a worm-killing drug, to prevent the grotesquely swollen legs and scrotums of elephantiasis, or lymphatic filariasis. Mr. Witty promised to quadruple the annual donation and make other gifts.”

In addition to these efforts, “just last month, in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations,” Mr. Witty made two new offers. GSK “screened its library of two million chemicals for all that attacked malaria, a process that took five technicians a year.” From the screening, the company will post 13,500 “hits,” on their website available free to anyone working on malaria.  

His other promise was to price the company’s GSK malaria vaccine, which the company had been working on for 23 years, at only 5 percent over the cost of making it if it passed clinical trials. “The company will not try to recoup the huge research costs, which have been shared by the United States Army and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.”

Mr. Witty’s work has been praised by Timothy Wells, M.D., chief scientific officer of the Medicines for Malaria Venture, which seeks new drugs. Dr. Wells asserted that Mr. Witty and GSK’s work will “probably speed up the process of finding new drugs to treat malaria by several years.” In addition, “Dr. Bernard Pécoul, executive director of the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative, said that “Glaxo was more innovative” than other companies trying to help the poor.

Regardless of the long list of GSK’s work with poor countries, Daniel Berman, who a decade ago co-founded Doctors Without Borders’ Access Campaign, criticized GSK. He noted that the transfer of vaccine technology could go “faster,” and that the “Tres Cantos lab still doesn’t have a big enough budget to make a difference.” He even claimed that the drugs GSK put into a patent pool were “silly” because “no one fought for those patent rights.” Such misguided criticisms are unwarranted, as the list above certainly shows that millions have benefited from GSK’s work.

Berman wants GSK to follow Unitaid’s goal, of overseeing “a pool of patents so new combination drugs can be made cheaply,” as Unitaid is doing with AIDS drugs already. In response, Mr. Witty noted that GSK is in “cordial negotiations with them now.”

Mr. Witty and GSK’s work should be applauded, and his attitude for helping change the world one drug at a time is a mission that every pharmaceutical company should attempt.

As a result, his example of running an “organization that can actually make a difference for people in the third world,” is one that should change the way media and the public view pharmaceutical companies.   

With private enterprise resources of companies and foundations such as GSK and Bill and Melinda Gates we may see the cure to Malaria and other diseases in our lifetimes.