Nature Medicine
April 2012, Volume 18 No 4 pp469-630
http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v18/n4/index.html

Q&A
Straight talk with…David Kaslow
Roxanne Khamsi
doi:10.1038/nm0412-479

Abstract
The precise human cost of malaria has come into dispute following the publication of a February paper that revised the estimated death toll to more than 1.2 million annually (Lancet 379, 413–431, 2012). But one thing that most people in the public health field can agree on is that a vaccine against malaria is necessary to make real strides against this global killer. To that effect, in 1999 the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded the Malaria Vaccine Initiative (MVI) through the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health, the Seattle-based nonprofit now simply known as PATH.
Since MVI’s inception, the Washington, DC–based initiative has played an instrumental part in advancing a number of leading vaccine candidates, including RTS,S, the first to show clinical efficacy in a major phase 3 trial. Steering the ship in the next phase of the journey is David Kaslow, who joined MVI as its director in March. As former head of the Merck Research Laboratories’ vaccine pipeline and architect of the Malaria Vaccine Development Unit at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), Kaslow spoke with Roxanne Khamsi about how his experience in the public and private sectors will help inform his decisions in the nonprofit world.