World-leading medicinal chemistry and biology at the Universities of Dundee and Cape Town have been allied to the industrial expertise of the Pharmaceuticals Division of Bayer (Germany), one of the world’s leading pharma companies, in an effort to develop critically needed new treatments for tuberculosis (TB).
The collaboration combines some of the world’s best knowledge on TB biology, drug discovery and medicinal chemistry, with access to an industrial library of chemical compounds.
All three partners in the new collaboration are already members of the Tuberculosis Drug Accelerator (TBDA), a programme launched in 2012 and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and which aims to identify novel therapies to reduce significantly the treatment time for TB. The tripartite collaboration between Bayer, the University of Dundee, and the University of Cape Town (UCT) will optimise hits from the Bayer compound library that were identified within the TBDA program, with the goal of developing them into potential preclinical drug candidates.
TB remains one of the deadliest infectious diseases in the world. Each year, 1.5 million people globally die from TB (a death every 21 seconds), with over 9 million falling ill from the disease, mainly in developing countries. Although effective, current first-line therapies for TB are considered inadequate owing to the fact that they take up to six months to cure patients. The long treatment regimen contributes to high rates of treatment default, leading to increased disease transmission, drug resistance, and death.
The Drug Discovery Unit (DDU) at the University of Dundee and UCT’s Drug Discovery and Development Centre (H3D) are two of the leading centres in academia for drug discovery globally, particularly relating to diseases across the developing world. Both are funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with DDU additionally funded by the Wellcome Trust. Notably, scientists at both DDU and H3D recently announced the separate discovery of new antimalarial compounds.
