Ares and PATH bet on better health

When pursuing new ideas in global health, things rarely go as planned. Researchers could unexpectedly lose funding. A promising new technology might need additional refinement. And sometimes, a team just needs more flexibility to figure out if a novel idea is worth pursuing.

Catalytic philanthropy can help at these pivotal moments by giving technical teams flexibility to respond as circumstances change, follow the evidence as it comes in, and keep driving for impact in their work.

Through its Pathfinder family of funds, Ares Management, a leading global alternative investment manager, brings that kind of support to its cross-sector work with PATH. The relationship combines Ares’ ability to mobilize philanthropic capital with PATH’s experience developing and advancing health innovations.

PATH President and CEO Nikolaj Gilbert put it simply: “This kind of support keeps important work moving forward, even when the path is uncertain. It creates room to act, not just react.”

For PATH, this flexibility is playing out in different ways: supporting a malaria vaccine study in Ghana, advancing ways to diagnose preeclampsia during pregnancy, and testing a new approach to combining climate, health, and water and sanitation data.

Ares’ investment in PATH’s malaria work is a great example of catalytic philanthropy. When funding for a malaria vaccine study in Ghana was abruptly halted in 2025, Ares’ support helped keep the trial going. The contribution from Ares also unlocked additional support from GiveWell and the Gates Foundation.

“If Ares hadn’t stepped in, then the trial would have had to stop,” says Dr. Megan Littrell, PATH study lead.

Malaria is an incredible story of progress in which investments over the past two decades have helped avert nearly 14 million deaths. But progress has stalled, funding fell sharply in 2025, and malaria still kills roughly one young child every minute.

While we have effective tools, access and coverage remain critical, especially for babies in the highest-burden areas. This trial is testing whether combining the malaria vaccine with another preventive malaria medicine can provide greater protection.

More than 2,300 babies are enrolled and are being followed through age two. Participant follow-up concluded in September 2026, with final results expected in early 2027.

The results will help national malaria programs decide whether the added protection from combining vaccination with preventive medicine justifies the additional cost and effort. This investment isn’t just protecting children now; it’s also generating evidence on impact and feasibility that could influence policy and lead to much broader adoption.

As Dr. Littrell says, “Studies like these really go a long way toward helping make those difficult decisions about what to fund.”

That’s what makes the investment catalytic: a targeted early investment that brings in other funders while preserving an opportunity to generate evidence that could ultimately protect millions more children.

Ares’ flexible support also gave PATH room to explore an evolving but underdeveloped area of maternal health: better ways to predict and diagnose preeclampsia.

A serious pregnancy complication that causes dangerously high blood pressure and other health problems for both mother and baby, preeclampsia can be difficult to predict and diagnose, especially in places with fewer resources where newer tools for diagnosis may not be available or easy to use.

One promising approach involves blood testing. Researchers are developing tests that look for biological clues in the blood that could signal who is at higher risk or confirm a diagnosis more accurately.

So far, relatively few of these tools have been designed or evaluated for use in lower-resource environments, despite the significant need.

With support from Ares, PATH reviewed the emerging diagnostic landscape, spoke with researchers, funders, and manufacturers, and determined where its product development expertise could be most beneficial. This flexible funding enabled the technical discovery work and field assessment that most grants do not cover.

According to Stephanie Zobrist, the PATH Senior Research and Development Officer who led this work, “The funding gave us the flexibility to take a fresh look at the diagnostic landscape and identify where PATH could add the most value.”

The program pointed to an important gap: promising discoveries are being made, and some products are even nearing the market, but more work is needed to turn those discoveries into practical tools that can be effective across a wider range of health systems.

PATH then partnered with manufacturers to test the usability of two blood-based tests in real-world, lower-resource settings. The findings have shaped follow-on funding proposals for a longer-term preeclampsia diagnostics strategy, with PATH focused on bridging discovery and practical products.

“Better tools could help clinicians identify risk earlier and make more informed decisions about care throughout pregnancy,” Zobrist says.

Support from Ares also gave PATH a chance to test a new idea before investing in a larger rollout: Could combining different kinds of health and climate information help health leaders view climate risk more clearly?

Health leaders already have information on climate hazards, disease patterns, and water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) conditions in health facilities. But that information is often kept in different places, obscuring which facilities face the greatest overall risk and where limited resources are most needed. Ideas at this stage are notoriously hard to fund, because no one yet knows if they will work.

Ares’ support enabled PATH to run the test. “The support from Ares allowed us to bring together a strong international team with experience and insight into all of these different areas, and we were able to successfully show that this combination approach revealed more information than any one factor individually,” says Clara Orndorff, Senior Research and Development Officer on PATH’s Medical Devices and Health Technologies team.

PATH assembled data from Ghana, Malawi, Mozambique, and Peru and developed a way to compare climate, epidemiological, and WASH risks. Using sample data from Mozambique, the team built a proof-of-concept dashboard in Power BI to show which health facilities might face the greatest risk.

The project is designed to become an open-source solution that health ministries in other countries can adapt. To start, the team focused on building a solid foundation of reliable data, a consistent way to compare different risks, and a dashboard to easily communicate results. Orndorff says data-driven automation will become more important as the project expands to larger datasets and additional countries.

The next phase will test the method on larger datasets, extend it to Ghana, Malawi, and Peru, and gather input from the health officials who would use it. Additional funding would move it from proof of concept to day-to-day use, helping leaders decide which facilities receive limited resources for WASH upgrades and climate-resilience investments.

Together, the projects show how flexible philanthropic capital can address different needs. In Ghana, it kept critical research moving through a sudden funding disruption. In maternal health and climate resilience, it gave PATH teams latitude to explore promising approaches and determine what should come next.

Ares extends that philosophy beyond individual PATH projects. Its Pathfinder family of funds ties investment performance to philanthropy and helped inspire Promote Giving, an independent initiative launched in 2025 to expand performance-linked philanthropy across the investment industry.

Ares was a founding signatory of Promote Giving, and PATH was a featured organization at its launch, where PATH Chief Global Health Programs Officer Kammerle Schneider participated in the launch event.

To date, nearly 20 signatories have joined Promote Giving and have committed the equivalent of at least 5 percent of performance fees from selected funds to charities focused on health, education, and other drivers of human well-being. The performance-based philanthropic pledge does not limit investment decisions or change a fund’s investment objective, and the charitable commitment comes from managers’ performance fees rather than investor returns. Participating funds represent more than $44 billion in pledged assets, which could result in an estimated $300–$350 million in potential charitable donations over the next decade.

Ares’ work with PATH offers a powerful model for cross-sector philanthropy: capital paired with the flexibility for technical experts to adapt, investigate, and learn. By allowing organizations room to respond to evolving needs, philanthropists can accelerate innovation, generate new knowledge, and help translate promising ideas into measurable impact.