by Martin Edlund, CEO, BillionScale Health

Over the past 20 years, innovations in global health have saved more than 100 million lives and driven child mortality rates to the lowest point in human history. The rate of innovation is accelerating, but there are still massive health challenges affecting billions of people around the globe.

That’s why we’re launching BillionScale Health. We’re on a mission to find and scale 5 breakthrough health solutions to one billion people each in the next ten years. 

That may sound wildly ambitious. Quixotic even, against a backdrop of declining aid dollars and mounting challenges like climate change and pandemic risk. But scale is what this moment calls for. Because scale changes everything.

Scale bends the curve on cost. Scale bends the curve on burden, freeing up precious health capacity. Scale empowers countries, and it creates a repeatable model for their neighbors to follow.

Not every solution is the right fit for our approach. We back the ones that will have the greatest impact on health outcomes –measured in deaths and DALYs per dollar – while also being practical, investible and ready to scale. (We know the ideal is often the enemy of the deal.)

So, what does it take to scale in the new global health landscape? Here are three factors that guide our work…

• Self-interest scales. For decades, “country-led” was a slogan of international development. We’re about to see what it really means in practice. As countries pay for more of their own healthcare, they will prioritize the things that matter most to the health and wealth of their people. This new dynamic creates a lot of momentum and opportunity, because self-interest scales.
  
  
• Simple scales. One of our first candidate technologies is a good illustration of this tenet. We are working with SC Johnson and malaria affected countries to rollout Guardian, a simple and effective “spatial repellent” for mosquitoes that was approved by the WHO in August of last year. A mesh square smaller than a sheet of paper, Guardian hangs on the wall and repels indoor mosquitoes for a full year, preventing malaria and other growing diseases like dengue. It is easier for patients than a bed net, addresses key gaps like daytime biting mosquitoes and lax usage, and could end up costing a fraction of nets on a per-person-protected basis. It couldn’t be simpler.
  
  
• Catalytic Capital Scales. Donors will play a much smaller (but still vital) role in the new funding model. The new “capital stack” for health will be led instead by countries, by consumers, by lenders and investors. All enabled by new structures that align interests and incentives. When everybody’s investment is leveraged, everyone wins – especially countries and the publics they serve.

The past year flipped the table on global health and the dust is still settling. We need to adapt to it, even help shape it. We are excited for that challenge, and we see tremendous opportunity.

If you share our ambition, optimism and hunger for scale, join us.

– Martin

Read on: “We’re in the Moonshots Business”