CEO Hotty - Victoria Hale

Inaugurating a series of snapshots of CEO Hotties, today we present Victoria Hale.  It takes more than hair product, misting, and good bones to qualify as a Sandhill CEO Hotty.  Your work has to be meaningful too.  Victoria Hale is Founder, CEO, and Chairman of the Board of the Institute for OneWorld Health, a non-profit pharmaceutical company.

Interviewed by Anna Sarver in Synapse, the UCSF student paper, Dr. Hale had this to say about the inspiration for her company:

There is one underlying feature of the pharmaceutical sciences that is after a while a bit annoying or disturbing, some people might even say makes them angry, and that is that the industry discovers or does research on so many more products or diagnostics than they'll ever take forward. There is a lot of initial work and abandonment of projects. I really came to know this intimately at FDA. There are perfectly good products but the key is that as you move along through late stage research and development, increasingly you have marketing groups or economic groups impacting the project and projects are routinely abandoned because corporations or groups realize that there is not the financial opportunity at the end of the road that you thought there was or hoped there was or something has changed.

That means that there are a lot of compounds, we'll call them drugs, that are available that haven't failed, they haven't produced toxicities. Some of them even have great efficacy in systems that they've been tested in; there just wasn't the financial justification to move them forward. After watching that for so many years and arguing with companies about not abandoning certain fields, certain orphan diseases for instance, I decided that there was enough out there in the infectious disease area, particularly in parasitology, to found a company. There is enough of what you can call "low hanging fruit." I decided as part of this that we had to be a non-profit organization; otherwise we would err always towards the profitability option, which is where everyone else was. We really needed a non-profit organization that could accept these compounds, and have access to funding like tax-free donations and funders like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

[If you would like to nominate a CEO Hotty to appear in this blog, send a digitized picture and enough bio detail for our judges to sink their teeth into to "CEO Hotties" c/o fpaynter@gmail.com]