11 June 2010

Drug Discovery Unit launches malaria project

The Drug Discovery Unit at the University of Dundee - which recently announced a major breakthrough towards developing a cure for African sleeping sickness - has received a new grant to start work on a new project to identify possible drug leads for malaria.

The Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV) has awarded the grant to Professor Ian Gilbert and colleagues at Dundee. An initial grant from MMV will support three scientists in the Drug Discovery Unit for nine months.

'This early stage drug discovery project follows on from a pilot project that we carried out with MMV. We screened one of our compound libraries to find chemical start points for a drug discovery programme. This was very successful,' said Professor Gilbert. 'The current funding is to develop these chemical start points further to try and identify possible drug leads. We are very excited to be developing our research into new areas that could one day have public health impact.'

Malaria is a debilitating and often deadly parasitic disease. Spread by the bite of an infected mosquito, the parasite causes 300-500 million clinical cases each year and is a major cause of poverty in some of the poorest countries in the world. Each year, about one million people die from malaria, mostly children under the age of 5 living in sub-Saharan Africa.

'Antimalarial drugs, insecticide-treated bednets and other mosquito control measures are some of the current key elements used to control this devastating disease.' said Professor Alan Fairlamb, co-founder of the Drug Discovery Unit at Dundee.

'Safe, affordable, new anti-malarials are critical in the fight against malaria and are desperately needed to replace current drug treatments that are becoming ineffective due to the spread of drug resistance.'

The Drug Discovery Unit at Dundee was formed in 2005 specifically to fill the void of research and development of drug targets for diseases of poverty like African sleeping sickness, leishmaniasis, and Chagas’ disease that afflict the developing world.

NOTES TO EDITORS

The University of Dundee is renowned for its academic contributions to tropical disease research. There are currently 76 scientists working in and collaborating with the Drug Discovery Unit, across a range of disciplines, with the aim of discovering new therapies for tropical diseases.

The Drug Discovery Unit (www.drugdiscovery.dundee.ac.uk) within the College of Life Sciences at Dundee was created in response to a lack of capacity in the UK for early stage drug discovery in the academic sector. The DDU’s aim is to translate basic science into lead compounds to validate putative drug targets, to use as tools to investigate disease pathways and, when appropriate, advance to pre-clinical drug candidates.

The drug discovery programme at the University matches the goals of both the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (www.dndi.org) and the UNICEF-UNDP-World Bank-WHO Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases.

The Drug Discovery Unit, from inception and including the construction and equipping of the new state-of-the-art labroratories, is expected to cost around £25 million to 2016. Investors include the Wellcome Trust, the Scottish Funding Council, The Wolfson Foundation, The European Regional Development Fund, the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative and the University itself.

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