| The university also announced the completion of a £13 million investment programme to develop drugs to treat African sleeping sickness, Chaga’s disease, endemic in South and Central America, and a range of diseases found across the tropics and sub-tropics called lieshmaniasis, which infect 12 million worldwide.
This came about with the announcement of a £8.1m grant from leading medical charity The Wellcome Trust, among the largest it has ever given.
No vaccines exist to prevent these debilitating and often lethal infections. Many of the current drugs used to treat them have serious side effects and would not meet standards for safety and efficacy.
Others are either too expensive for widespread use or are becoming less effective because of resistance.
The research required to find new treatments has been made possible by the Wellcome cash, the final piece in a jigsaw that has already received significant investment from the university, Scottish Higher Education Funding Council and the Wolfson Foundation
The Wellcome contribution will allow the recruitment of 16 additional scientists to add to the team of 60 headed by Professors Mike Ferguson and Alan Fairlamb already working in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research.
Both men have been working in the field of tropical medicine for over 25 years and their team made a breakthrough in developing therapies for what are some of the world’s most neglected diseases last year. They found that while all are spread by different biting insects, the organism they transmit which causes each disease has common elements and this makes it susceptible to a single drug.
Professor Mike Ferguson said today the team has already identified 12 drug targets within the organism and the work now will validate each of their characteristics.
He said, “The next phase will be to prioritise the list to establish the most practical target and then to search for some molecules or drugs which attack that target. The hits will be refined to identify the drug that is most effective and then we will refine its potency and reduce toxicity.
“We would hope to have a pre-clinical drug candidate, a new drug ready to be taken to human clinical trials, within the five-year period of this research funding.
“The trials would be done by an organisation like the World Health Organisation over two, two and a half years —a very achievable timeframe.”
He said, “Getting all the pieces in place to carry out a serious drug discovery programme in an academic environment is virtually unprecedented and quite demanding. Everyone in the team has done a fantastic job.”
There are over 140,000 reported deaths from these diseases annually but it is generally recognised this is an underestimate because of the lack of medical reporting in many under-developed countries.
The WHO estimates there are 400,000 cases of tsetse fly transmitted African sleeping sickness each year and more than 16 million people have Chaga’s disease.
The gap between basic research in academic laboratories and applied research in the drug industry has widened over the last decade, with drug companies not seeing development in this area as profitable.
Professor Ferguson said that public private partnerships have seen a lot of movement in recent years towards delivering new drugs. He believes the research being carried out in Dundee could lead to a vaccine against the diseases, although he said it would more likely be used by health workers going into infected areas than for mass immunisation to avoid resistant strains evolving. |
