[Vision2020] New Scientist: Taking on neglected diseases

[Art Deco]

Taking on neglected diseases
  a.. 30 September 2006 
  b.. From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues. 

They kill millions of people each year - and get away with it. Tropical diseases account for about 12 per cent of global sickness, yet only 1.3 per cent of all drugs developed between 1975 and 2004 were for treating these infections. Last week, scientists from 34 nations met in Nairobi, Kenya, to discuss the problem.

"These diseases are neglected because the market-driven drug R&D system that predominates in the developed world neglects the needs of the patients in the developing world," says Ann-Marie Sevcsik of the Geneva-based Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi). The diseases, such as sleeping sickness, leishmaniasis and malaria, tend to affect the poorest and most powerless in rural and deprived urban areas of developing countries.

At the meeting, delegates resolved to ensure that two potential drugs for sleeping sickness enter preclinical trials by 2008, as part of broader goal to develop six to eight new field-relevant treatments for neglected diseases by 2014. To meet these goals, support from drug companies and aid agencies will be vital, such as the $100 million that the US Agency for International Development last week committed to neglected diseases. However, it is also crucial to draw on local experience, says Monique Wasunna, DNDi's Africa coordinator and chair of the Leishmaniasis East Africa Platform.

"The greatest challenge to healthcare in the developing world is the ability to develop tools of modern science that are adapted to the socioeconomic conditions of patients in the developing world," Wasunna says. For example, DNDi will soon distribute a new artemisinin-based drug for chloroquine-resistant malaria that involves taking a single tablet just once every three days. Such fixed-dosed therapies should make it much simpler to get patients to finish their treatment.

>From issue 2571 of New Scientist magazine, 30 September 2006, page 6
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