scholarly journals WIPO Re:Search: Catalyzing Public-Private Partnerships to Accelerate Tropical Disease Drug Discovery and Development

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathyryne Manner ◽  
Katy Graef ◽  
Jennifer Dent
Keyword(s):  
Drug Discovery ◽  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Neglected Tropical Diseases ◽  
Tropical Disease ◽  
New Drugs ◽  
World Intellectual Property Organization ◽  
Tropical Diseases ◽  
Middle Income ◽  
Drug Discovery And Development ◽  
Partnership Model

Tropical diseases, including malaria and a group of infections termed neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), pose enormous threats to human health and wellbeing globally. In concert with efforts to broaden access to current treatments, it is also critical to expand research and development (R&D) of new drugs that address therapeutic gaps and concerns associated with existing medications, including emergence of resistance. Limited commercial incentives, particularly compared to products for diseases prevalent in high-income countries, have hindered many pharmaceutical companies from contributing their immense product development know-how and resources to tropical disease R&D. In this article we present WIPO Re:Search, an international initiative co-led by BIO Ventures for Global Health (BVGH) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), as an innovative and impactful public-private partnership model that promotes cross-sector intellectual property sharing and R&D to accelerate tropical disease drug discovery and development. Importantly, WIPO Re:Search also drives progress toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Through case studies, we illustrate how WIPO Re:Search empowers high-quality tropical disease drug discovery researchers from academic/non-profit organizations and small companies (including scientists in low- and middle-income countries) to leapfrog their R&D programs by accessing pharmaceutical industry resources that may not otherwise be available to them.

scholarly journals Cheaper faster drug development validated by the repositioning of drugs against neglected tropical diseases

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (104) ◽  
pp. 20141289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Williams ◽  
Elizabeth Bilsland ◽  
Andrew Sparkes ◽  
Wayne Aubrey ◽  
Michael Young ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Drug Discovery ◽  
Boolean Functions ◽  
Neglected Tropical Diseases ◽  
Quantitative Structure Activity Relationship ◽  
New Drugs ◽  
Automation System ◽  
Tropical Diseases ◽  
Standard Drug ◽  
Anti Cancer ◽  
Lead Generation

There is an urgent need to make drug discovery cheaper and faster. This will enable the development of treatments for diseases currently neglected for economic reasons, such as tropical and orphan diseases, and generally increase the supply of new drugs. Here, we report the Robot Scientist ‘Eve’ designed to make drug discovery more economical. A Robot Scientist is a laboratory automation system that uses artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to discover scientific knowledge through cycles of experimentation. Eve integrates and automates library-screening, hit-confirmation, and lead generation through cycles of quantitative structure activity relationship learning and testing. Using econometric modelling we demonstrate that the use of AI to select compounds economically outperforms standard drug screening. For further efficiency Eve uses a standardized form of assay to compute Boolean functions of compound properties. These assays can be quickly and cheaply engineered using synthetic biology, enabling more targets to be assayed for a given budget. Eve has repositioned several drugs against specific targets in parasites that cause tropical diseases. One validated discovery is that the anti-cancer compound TNP-470 is a potent inhibitor of dihydrofolate reductase from the malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium vivax .

scholarly journals Overcoming the Challenges of Drug Discovery for Neglected Tropical Diseases

2013 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelly L. Johnston ◽  
Louise Ford ◽  
Mark J. Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Drug Discovery ◽  
Neglected Tropical Diseases ◽  
Integrated Control ◽  
Development Program ◽  
Control Measures ◽  
World Health ◽  
Poor People ◽  
Tropical Diseases ◽  
Drug Discovery And Development ◽  
Health Organization

Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) are a group of 17 diseases that typically affect poor people in tropical countries. Each has been neglected for decades in terms of funding, research, and policy, but the recent grouping of them into one unit, which can be targeted using integrated control measures, together with increased advocacy has helped to place them on the global health agenda. The World Health Organization has set ambitious goals to control or eliminate 10 NTDs by 2020 and launched a roadmap in January 2012 to guide this global plan. The result of the launch meeting, which brought together representatives from the pharmaceutical industry, donors, and politicians, was the London Declaration: a series of commitments to provide more drugs, research, and funds to achieve the 2020 goals. Drug discovery and development for these diseases are extremely challenging, and this article highlights these challenges in the context of the London Declaration, before focusing on an example of a drug discovery and development program for the NTDs onchocerciasis and lymphatic filariasis (the anti- Wolbachia consortium, A·WOL).

scholarly journals Use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Discovery of Drugs for Neglected Tropical Diseases

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Winkler
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Machine Learning ◽  
Drug Discovery ◽  
Neglected Tropical Diseases ◽  
Tropical Disease ◽  
Neglected Tropical Disease ◽  
Tropical Diseases ◽  
Entry Barrier ◽  
Ongoing Research ◽  
Technological Developments

Neglected tropical diseases continue to create high levels of morbidity and mortality in a sizeable fraction of the world’s population, despite ongoing research into new treatments. Some of the most important technological developments that have accelerated drug discovery for diseases of affluent countries have not flowed down to neglected tropical disease drug discovery. Pharmaceutical development business models, cost of developing new drug treatments and subsequent costs to patients, and accessibility of technologies to scientists in most of the affected countries are some of the reasons for this low uptake and slow development relative to that for common diseases in developed countries. Computational methods are starting to make significant inroads into discovery of drugs for neglected tropical diseases due to the increasing availability of large databases that can be used to train ML models, increasing accuracy of these methods, lower entry barrier for researchers, and widespread availability of public domain machine learning codes. Here, the application of artificial intelligence, largely the subset called machine learning, to modelling and prediction of biological activities and discovery of new drugs for neglected tropical diseases is summarized. The pathways for the development of machine learning methods in the short to medium term and the use of other artificial intelligence methods for drug discovery is discussed. The current roadblocks to, and likely impacts of, synergistic new technological developments on the use of ML methods for neglected tropical disease drug discovery in the future are also discussed.

scholarly journals Editorial: Cheminformatics Approaches in Drug Discovery for Neglected Tropical Diseases

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luciana Scotti ◽  
Eugene Muratov ◽  
Alejandro Speck-Planche ◽  
Marcus T. Scotti
Keyword(s):  
Drug Discovery ◽  
Neglected Tropical Diseases ◽  
Tropical Diseases

scholarly journals Whatever happened to China’s neglected tropical diseases?

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter J. Hotez
Keyword(s):  
Disease Control ◽  
Poverty Reduction ◽  
Neglected Tropical Diseases ◽  
Public Health Problem ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
Tropical Disease ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Parasitic Infections ◽  
Neglected Tropical Disease ◽  
Tropical Diseases

Abstract Before the founding of the People’s Republic of China 70 years ago, both extreme poverty and parasitic infections and other neglected tropical diseases were highly prevalent. Owing to social development, particularly economic reforms since the 1980s, poverty has since been dramatically reduced, and China became increasingly urbanized and industrialized. In parallel, China’s economic transformation translated into similar and remarkable reductions in neglected tropical diseases. Qian and colleagues report in their review published in Infectious Diseases of Poverty, the elimination or near elimination as a public health problem of lymphatic filariasis, trachoma, soil-transmitted helminth infections, schistosomiasis and other neglected tropical diseases. Of note, neglected tropical disease control and poverty reduction each appear to reinforce the other. China’s formula for success in parasitic and neglected tropical disease control might translate to other parts of the world, such as in sub-Saharan Africa through China’s new Belt and Road Initiative.

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