Scottish university receives £10m for neglected tropical disease research
Dundee University, GSK and Wellcome Trust enter five-year collaboration
The University of Dundee has received more than £10m from the Wellcome Trust to tackle some of the world’s most neglected parasitic diseases, including support for a multi-million pound partnership with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) to discover new drug treatments.
The Drug Discovery Unit at Dundee will work with GSK’s Kinetoplastids Discovery Performance Unit (DPU) at its Tres Cantos Medicines Development Campus in Spain.
The collaboration will focus on the development of safe and affordable treatments for Chagas disease, leishmaniasis and African sleeping sickness.
The partnership aims to deliver at least one treatment against one of the diseases in the next five years. It is being supported by a grant of £8.6m from the Wellcome Trust.
‘These parasitic diseases, which afflict millions of people worldwide, are collectively responsible for about 150,000 deaths every year in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The drugs currently used to treat patients are often difficult to administer, have toxic side effects and are not always effective due to drug resistance,’ said Professor Alan Fairlamb, an international expert on parasite biochemistry, based in the Drug Discovery Unit at Dundee.
‘Better, safer drugs are needed that are cheap and easy to administer, because most of these patients are living in poverty without access to hospitals or clinics.’
Significant progress has been made in Dundee towards the development of a new treatment for African sleeping sickness over the past five years, and there have been promising results in identifying potential treatments for leishmaniasis.
The University has several types of compounds with promising activity in animal models. The next step is to chemically modify these molecules to find the optimal balance of drug-like properties for clinical trials.
The teams at Dundee and GSK will now work together to expand their activities in an integrated, multidisciplinary effort to find effective treatments for the three diseases.
‘The support from the Wellcome Trust has enabled us to create a powerful team by combining DDU’s and GSK’s considerable expertise and infrastructure, to accelerate progress towards discovering new drugs for these terrible diseases,’ said Professor Paul Wyatt, head of the DDU.
The funding comes in addition to a recent award of £1.5m by the Wellcome Trust to Professor Fairlamb to investigate Chagas disease.
Dr Ted Bianco, director of Technology Transfer at the Wellcome Trust, said: ‘This significant award from the Wellcome Trust recognises the University’s distinguished track record in the area of neglected tropical diseases and its strategic approach to translational research. The partnership with GSK is an exciting and timely development that brings together complementary skills from academia and industry. I applaud both parties for their commitment to global health.’
GSK has a long-standing commitment to developing new and better treatments for NTDs through collaborative partnerships and global information sharing programmes.
The company is a founding member of the WIPO Re:Search consortium, which brings together eight leading pharmaceutical companies in collaboration with multiple non-profit research organisations under the auspices of WIPO – a UN body – to help accelerate the development of new and better treatments against neglected tropical diseases (NTDs).
GSK continues to invest in its own r&d programme for diseases that most affect developing countries, including NTDs. This r&d portfolio currently includes projects for Chagas’, dengue, human African trypanosomiasis and leishmaniasis.
Earlier this year the company joined a new global partnership of other major pharmaceutical companies and leading organisations including the World Health Organisation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in a united effort to control or eliminate 10 NTDs by the end of the decade.
