"We are thinking of this as a bold experiment," said Wendy Taylor, who was hired to be the group's new chief executive as plans took shape in Washington over the past 18 months. "These biotech chief executives are entrepreneurs, and they'd love to be able to come up with the world's first malaria vaccine or HIV vaccine. They need not only the money to move the projects forward, but tools to help them think about operating in these markets."

BIO Ventures for Global Health is part of a broader push in the world of public health, backed with serious money from the Gates and Rockefeller foundations, to solve a series of vexing business issues that have prevented vaccines and other lifesaving medical technologies from reaching the poor.

The problem is not so much funding the basic science that might provide needed medical technologies. Congress has for many years been willing to finance work on foreign diseases that don't afflict the United States. The National Institutes of Health and U.S. military doctors have used that money to produce several important scientific insights, and even potential vaccines.

But public-health experts have realized, to their dismay, that an NIH scientist holding up a test tube in Bethesda and shouting, "Eureka!" doesn't begin to solve medical problems in poor countries. A multitude of logistical, scientific and business problems stands between that test tube and a sick child in, say, Kenya or Nepal.

For starters, the government itself doesn't have much ability to manufacture medicines and has generally done a poor job when it has tried, experts said. So the job has fallen to private industry. The task can involve spending tens or hundreds of millions to run large-scale tests, build factories, develop complex manufacturing lines, ensure rigorous quality control -- and do it all under stringent cost controls that mean the vaccine or drug can be sold at a profit.

With drugs intended for rich countries, firms can tap venture capitalists or stock investors to finance the work, since there's a promise of profit -- often big profit -- at the end. But that hasn't worked nearly as well for products meant partly or entirely for poor countries.

There's so little money involved that many private investors simply aren't interested. The health budgets of the world's poorest countries, added together, don't equal the sales of a single blockbuster rich-country drug for ulcers or heart disease.

The problem has grown more acute in recent years as the genetic research pouring from the world's laboratories has opened new horizons. It is now an article of faith among many scientists that they will be able to create vaccines against humanity's great scourges: malaria, tuberculosis and other diseases that kill millions every year in poor countries. But can they get those products onto the market and into the villages where they are needed most?

Much of the necessary technology is being developed not in big drug companies, which can afford a certain amount of charity, but in small, scrappy American biotechnology companies. These companies, whose work is based entirely on genetic knowledge, are the source of much of the innovation in medicine today, but they are often tiny outfits with fewer than 100 employees.

Few of those companies have figured out business plans that might allow them to take a product all the way through the development cycle and put it on the market for use in poor countries.