Pacific Health Summit
Overview
"The key challenge for us at this Summit—as laid out implicitly by the electorates, patients, and stakeholders we represent—is to grapple in practical terms with how we best integrate these opportunities into our healthcare systems. We cannot stand on the sidelines… Healthcare needs to move from being our greatest modern cost to becoming our greatest modern asset."
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William Castell, Chairman, The Wellcome Trust; and Former CEO, GE Healthcare
NBR's Center for Health and Aging (CHA) serves as the Secretariat for the Pacific Health Summit. This annual, invitation-only event welcomes 250 top leaders from science, industry, and policy each June to discuss how to realize the dream of a healthier future. Every year the Pacific Health Summit focuses on a single theme designed to tackle a critical topic in global health. Past themes include maternal and newborn health (2010), multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (2009), malnutrition (2008), and pandemic influenza (2007). Vaccines will be the theme for the 2011 Summit.
The Pacific Health Summit is a place where leaders establish ground-breaking projects and initiatives. For example, in June 2007 Eli Lilly announced a commitment of $15 million to the "Lilly Not-for-Profit Partnership for Early Phase Drug Discovery." At the 2007 Summit the Director-General of the WHO also announced the establishment of a pre-pandemic flu vaccine stockpile. GSK immediately followed with an announcement that the company would donate 50 million doses of its pre-pandemic flu vaccine to the stockpile. Furthering the important work of the 2007 Summit, in 2009 sanofi aventis pledged 100 million doses of H5N1 flu vaccine to the WHO for developing countries.
To learn more about the Summit, visit www.pacifichealthsummit.org.