The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is giving Scripps Research $50 million to fight two of the world’s biggest killers — tuberculosis and malaria — and to help the La Jolla institute gear up for other global health threats, such as China’s deadly coronavirus.

The project will be headed by Scripps’ drug development division, Calibr, which has had success in creating therapies for malaria and HIV, both which have ravaged parts of Africa and southeast Asia.

Calibr researchers also are working on an injectable anti-malarial drug that’s meant to prevent people from contracting a disease that kills roughly 1 million people a year, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. By comparison, tuberculosis annually kills 1.5 million, which is roughly the population of San Diego.

The Gates Foundation — which has a heavy focus on global health — began investing in Calibr in 2014, giving the institute $30 million to speed up drug development.


Calibr later merged with Scripps Research, which conducts basic research, work that is essential to identifying new drug candidates.

The new gift raises the Gates family’s total support to Calibr and Scripps to $135 million, making the foundation — created by Microsoft’s co-founder and his wife, a former general manager at the software giant — one of the largest private supporters of life science research in San Diego over the past six years.

“Our basic science and drug development gives us the capabilities of a pharmaceutical company,” said Arnab Chatterjee, Calibr’s vice president for medicinal chemistry.

“We can test drugs in patients. That helps us get a jump on diseases that are happening across the globe, but which can show up on your doorstep in weeks.”


That’s exactly what has happened with the Chinese coronavirus. It began infecting people in central China in mid-December and soon spread to at least 13 other countries, including the U.S. Individual cases have been reported in Orange and Los Angeles counties. And San Diego County health officials are examining if a case has been confirmed in a local hospital.

This week, the potential for infection became so worrisome the University of California system suspended the education abroad programs it conducts with China. The suspension came less than a week after UC San Diego notified its nearly 39,000 students of the emerging crisis and asked students to report to a campus health clinic if they had symptoms of the virus.

This is a particular issue at UC San Diego, which has about 5,600 Chinese students, the largest number of any UC campus.

While that was happening, many Scripps Research scientists quickly shifted their attention to studying aspects of the coronavirus. They included immunologist Kristian Andersen, who has taken on a central question in the outbreak: Does the coronavirus get transmitted when people have symptoms of the virus or when they don’t?


“If it occurs when people are symptomatic it would be easier to contain because you could isolate those who get it,” Andersen told the Union-Tribune.

Scripps scientists work broadly across the fields of health and medicine, studying everything from HIV, tuberculosis and cancer to Lyme disease and influenza.

In recent years, Calibr has come up with five potential drug candidates for problems as different as malaria and parasites.

Most drugs don’t make it beyond the test stage. And those that do can be of limited effect.


“The vaccines for malaria only work 30 to 40 percent of the time, which is why we’re working on a chemical drug that could be injected,” Chatterjee said. “We think it would be more efficient and efficacious.”

Scripps has had breakthroughs in the past. Its scientists played a lead role in developing Surfaxin, an FDA-approved drug that’s given to premature babies with certain breathing problems. The institute also invented Tafamadis, a medicine the FDA approved last year to treat a form of cardiomyopathy.

The key to more success involves Scripps’ growing relationship with the Gates Foundation, said Matt Tremblay, Scripps’ chief operating officer.

“The foundation has people spread all over the world, where they really see what the problems are,” Tremblay said.


“They share that with our basic scientists, and with our drug developers, who will have different perspectives. This is a model that works.”