WHO's TDR awarded US$1.5m to test new malaria treatment
The WHO's Tropical Disease Research Programme (TDR) has received a grant of US$1.5m (€1.53m) from the Gates Malaria Partnership at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine to support trials on a new treatment for malaria. The contribution will fund a research initiative to assess the public health benefits of Lapdap (chlorproguanil/dapsone).
Lapdap, a long-term drug evaluation project of the University of Liverpool, has been developed as the result of a collaboration between TDR, the UK Government's Department for International Development (DFID) and the manufacturer of the drug, GlaxoSmithKline. The objective of the collaboration has been to produce a drug that would be safe, effective and, importantly, affordable for the treatment of malaria in Africa. The existing low-cost treatments - chloroquine and sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine - are becoming dangerously ineffective as the malaria parasites become more resistant.
The grant will be used to fund TDR-led research to improve understanding of the properties of Lapdap. Proposed studies will, in addition to looking for rare adverse drug reactions, assess whether the new drug will be practical to dose and easy to take, and also monitor whether any resistance to the drug is developing within the malaria parasites.
The WHO recommends that where there is widespread resistance to low-cost treatments, countries consider introducing artemisinin-based combination drug treatments. Lapdap may form an important partner drug with artemisinins for combination therapy for Africa, and this potential is being explored in a parallel drug development project.