TB and neglected diseases targeted by new centre  

With an urgent need for new treatments for infectious diseases such as TB and malaria in the developing world, a £6.5 million centre is to be created at the University of Dundee to boost the development of potential drug candidates.

Despite significant efforts in early stage drug discovery, there is a bottleneck when it comes to the lead optimisation stage of molecules targeting these diseases as this labour intensive process through design, synthesis and testing requires significant laboratory resource over a number of years.

To address this need Professor Paul Wyatt and colleagues at the Drug Discovery Unit (DDU) at the University of Dundee, with joint funding from the Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, are establishing ‘A Centre of Excellence for Lead Optimisation for Diseases of the Developing World’.. The £6.5million investment over five years will create 11 new posts.

Professor Wyatt said, “One of the main aims of the Drug Discovery Unit is to make inroads into developing drugs for diseases that affected the developing world. We have the capability through the DDU to help break the bottleneck which occurs at a key stage of the drug discovery process.”

The initial focus will be on TB, the world’s second-leading infectious killer, disproportionately affecting developing countries; in 2010 causing 1.4 million deaths, 8.8 million new infections and 450 thousand drug-resistant TB cases. First-line therapies for TB are old and inadequate, taking six months to cure patients. The long treatment regimen contributes to high treatment default rates that can lead to increased disease transmission, drug resistance, and death.