Illustration by Matthew Woodson
Many employees were devastated when Pfizer announced the closing of its Chesterfield operation in November 2009. But Peter Ruminski, a former Pfizer associate research fellow in drug discovery, saw an opportunity. He wanted to take a handful of the 600-plus pharmaceutical scientists who would soon be out of work and start a nonprofit devoted to developing drug treatments for diseases in third-world countries, places where those affected were either too poor or too few to be a viable drug market.
Seeing a newspaper article in which Saint Louis University vice president for research Ray Tait said “maybe SLU could help out in some way” regarding the layoffs, Ruminski called to take him up on the offer. SLU leapt at the opportunity, securing $5 million for the center for its first two years; Pfizer also donated equipment.
In July 2010, the 16-member team composing the Center for World Health & Medicine began improving treatments for diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, and acute childhood diarrhea. “We want to make an impact sooner rather than later,” explains Ruminski, now the center’s executive director. “Drug development takes a long time, and there are patients out there with unmet needs. So we just felt this need to accelerate it, work twice as hard and get it set up.”
The center relies on collaboration. Grants from organizations like the Institute for OneWorld Health, as well as collaborations with investigators at Washington University School of Medicine, the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health in China, and Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, accelerate drug discovery. The center also assists researchers in developing and newly industrialized countries like South Africa. “Our hope is that...they can start not only trying to develop some new drugs for these diseases that are prevalent on their own continent, but they’ll also start learning some of the strategies and complexities that go into developing medicines,” says Ruminski.
While the center doesn’t have any drugs on the market yet (that usually takes eight to 10 years), it is in the clinical trial phase for a drug that alleviates symptoms of sickle cell anemia in children at SSM Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center. “A lot of times when people go into pharmaceutical science, they have an altruistic passion to help people in need,” says Ruminski. “But you feel that you could do more, because a company directs what disease targets you look at from their commercial interests. Now we’re directing the research.”
