Case Study: Informatics For Neglected Diseases Collaborations

By: Thomson Reuters

Tropical infectious diseases affect millions of individuals, predominantly in the developing world. The low financial viability for the sale of new pharmaceutical products in these poor countries does not offer an incentive to enable the high and risk-associated investments in R&D required for the discovery of new treatments for these diseases. Consequently, while these 'neglected diseases' affect many individuals, the research effort has been minimal for the past several decades. Drugs currently used to treat these diseases are of limited availability and efficacy, are costly, and in many cases are based on old molecules, some of which have severe toxic effects. Furthermore, resistance to these drugs has emerged in several of these neglected diseases. For the purposes of this review, the diseases considered as neglected are those diseases listed by the WHO (eg, African sleeping sickness, visceral leishmaniasis, Chagas disease and schistosomiasis), in addition to malaria and tuberculosis. R&D efforts for these diseases are managed by virtual organizations, and thus information management represents a key challenge.

To address the need for better treatment of neglected diseases, several not-for-profit organizations have emerged in the past decade. These organizations are known as public-private partnerships (PPPs), as they share a common model that combines investment and expertise from the public sector and industry. Examples of such PPPs include the WHO's Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases (WHO/TDR), the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi), the Medicines for Malaria Ventures (MMV), the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development (TB Alliance), the Institute for OneWorld Health (iOWH), the Malaria Vaccine Initiative (MVI) and the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND).

These PPPs have effectively raised money from different funding sources, including governments and charitable organizations such as The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust. PPPs use these funds to conduct a virtual drug-discovery and development model, and have established a global network of multidisciplinary partners, including large pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology companies, not-for-profit organizations, CROs and academic institutions, in order to conduct R&D programs for various neglected diseases.

After having initially targeted the easy-to-achieve goals, such as expanding the applications of existing drugs, the PPPs have now evolved to address the entire cycle of drug discovery and development in order to sustain the delivery of innovative technologies. The PPPs coordinate multiple projects at every stage, managing a portfolio in a similar manner to large pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.