Treatment and prevention strategies for fighting infectious diseases are likely to come from partnerships between scientists and industry, according to Eric Rubin, the Irene Heinz Given Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
In an interview published online in the August 2016 issue of Infectious Disease News, Rubin said that industry has been instrumental in helping discover new antibiotics and ways to deliver them to patients.
“There’s no substitute,” Rubin said. “Many types of expertise that are needed to turn a discovery— even if it was made in academia—into a drug only exist in industry.”
For example, the first Zika vaccine—developed by U.S. manufacturer Inovio Pharmaceuticals and South Korea’s GeneOne Life Science—was approved for clinical trials in people just over four months after the virus was declared a public health emergency.
Read Infectious Disease News article: Public-private partnerships critical in fight against infectious diseases