£10 million boost for neglected tropical disease
research at Dundee
Dundee, GSK and
Wellcome Trust enter five-year collaboration for neglected diseases
New Delhi, 7th
March 2011. The University
of Dundee has received
over £10 million from the Wellcome Trust in the fight against 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 the company’s Tres Cantos Medicines Development
Campus in Spain .
The goal of
the collaboration is to develop safe and affordable treatments for Chagas
disease, leishmaniasis and African sleeping sickness. These are neglected
tropical diseases (NTDs) which kill tens of thousands of people across the
developing world every year and are caused, in some cases, by parasites called
kinetoplastids.
The
partnership’s aim is to deliver at least one treatment against one of the
diseases in the next five years. It is being supported by a grant of
£8.6million 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 in particular over
the past five years, and there have been promising results in identifying
potential treatments for leishmaniasis.
“Currently
we have a portfolio of discovery projects in various stages of development in
African sleeping sickness and visceral leishmaniasis“, said Professor
Mike Ferguson. “We have 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”.
Now
the expert teams at Dundee and GSK will work
together to expand their activities in an integrated, multidisciplinary effort to
find effective treatments for the three diseases.
“Having
an industry-experienced, multidisciplinary drug discovery team housed alongside
world leaders in the biology of these parasites is a major strength of the Drug
Discovery Unit and is rare in a UK university,” explained Professor Paul
Wyatt, Head of the DDU.
“We
are very pleased to have GSK as a valued partner in the project. 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.
We have already forged a very productive partnership and look forward to an
exciting and successful future.”
The
funding comes in addition to a recent award of £1.5million 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 organizations 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
active 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 GSK
joined a new global partnership of other major pharmaceutical companies and
leading organisations including the World Health Organization and the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation in a new united effort to control or eliminate 10 NTDs
by the end of the decade.
NOTES
TO EDITORS
With more than 1000 scientists, research students and support staff form 58 countries and external funding in excess of £30 million per year, the College of Life Sciences at the University of Dundee is one of the largest and most productive Life Sciences research institutes in Europe . Consistently voted one of ‘the best places for a life scientist to work’ by The Scientist magazine, the College has an international reputation for its basic and translational research and was recognised in the 2011 Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council Excellence with Impact Awards for `Greatest Delivery of Impact'.
The University
of Dundee is the central hub for a
multi-million pound biotechnology sector in the east of
Scotland , which now accounts for
16% of the local economy.
University researchers
collaborate with many of world’s major pharmaceutical companies in the
fight against diseases such as cancer, diabetes, inherited skin diseases,
Huntington’s disease and rheumatoid arthritis.
The University’s Drug
Discovery Unit is actively developing drugs for the treatment of neglected
tropical diseases, including Chagas’ disease, leishmaniasis, African
sleeping sickness and malaria, and translating innovative drug targets in
oncology, eczema, Alzheimer’s disease, anti-bacterials and anti-virals.
About the Wellcome Trust
The
Wellcome Trust is a global charitable foundation dedicated to achieving
extraordinary improvements in human and animal health. It supports the
brightest minds in biomedical research and the medical humanities. The
Trust’s breadth of support includes public engagement, education and the
application of research to improve health. It is independent of both political
and commercial interests. www.wellcome.ac.uk
GlaxoSmithKline – one of the world’s leading research-based
pharmaceutical and healthcare companies – is committed to improving the
quality of human life by enabling people to do more, feel better and live
longer. For further information please visit www.gsk.com
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