Groups announce remarkable progress against neglected tropical diseases
Although many Americans have never heard of diseases such as sleeping sickness or river blindness, they are among the most common infections of the world’s poor. Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) debilitate or kill more than one billion people each year in the developing world. For example, two-thirds of all reported sleeping sickness cases worldwide are found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where healthcare is often inaccessible to large parts of the population. “People in the DRC and many countries in Africa have hoped for a safe, easy-to-use, and effective treatment against sleeping sickness for generations,” said Dr. Miaka Mia Bilenge, special advisor to the National Control Program for sleeping sickness in the DRC.
Fortunately, researchers and health care workers recently came together at the first-ever International Society for Infectious Diseases meeting on NTDs to discuss current treatment efforts, as well as the need for new drugs, vaccines, and other health tools. Ahead of the meeting, Bernard Pecoul, executive director of the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative, and Peter Hotez, president of Sabin Vaccine Institute, wrote in a PLoS Medicine blog that the US Global Health Initiative (GHI) has prioritized the elimination of certain NTDs. Indeed, great “progress in reaching these elimination targets is being achieved through a program of mass treatment,” the authors write, adding, “To date, more than 100 million people have received access to essential medicines for NTDs through funding from the US Agency for International Development (USAID).”
While it is critical to continue providing access to existing NTD therapies, there is an “urgent need to implement a parallel program of development, manufacture, and clinical testing of new drugs, diagnostics, and vaccines,” Pecoul and Hotez write. They add that research and development (R&D) for new tools is urgent because many existing drugs are “limited in effectiveness and safety, are difficult to use, or come with serious concerns about resistance.”
In fact, several groups have recently announced progress in developing new NTD therapies. For example, a unique partnership between DNDi and two biotechnology companies—California’s Anacor Pharmaceuticals and North Carolina’s SCYNEXIS Inc.—had led to the successful completion of pre-clinical studies for the first new oral drug candidate to combat sleeping sickness, or African trypanosomiasis. The new drug candidate will soon advance to human clinical trials.
Also at the conference, DNDi announced a new R&D project targeting NTDs to address the needs of patients in Africa and Asia. The project will examine a drug called flubendazole to treat river blindness and elephantiasis, in co-infection with African eyeworm. DNDi is partnering with Michigan State University, McGill University, the Indian pharmaceutical company Advinus Therapeutics, and French drug companies Drugabilis and Bertin Pharma.
According to Pecoul and Hotez, the US Government also has a unique and vital role to play in NTD research. The United States has “led the way in ensuring the poorest people receive urgently needed treatments for NTDs, while simultaneously supporting programs of basic research. This commitment has spanned several presidential administrations, receiving widespread support from both Democrats and Republicans in the US Congress,” the authors write. They add that at the conference, “we will join with other leading NTD experts in Boston to call for the expansion of the US Government’s approach to NTDs so that it includes new investments in R&D to develop and test new products for a wider range of neglected diseases. Only then will we be able to eliminate the neglect of millions of poor people in need and at risk.”
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