Host: The Japanese Pharmacological Society, The Japanese Society of Clinical Pharmacology
Name : WCP2018 (18th World Congress of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology)
Location : Kyoto
Date : July 01, 2018 - July 06, 2018
A game-changing mechanism of developing new treatments for neglected patients has been awaited because the current capitalism in private sector seldom allows to develop new treatments without profit. One of the mechanisms to overcome this stereotype is so-called Product Development Partnership (PDP) which enables to develop new treatments through collaboration of pharmaceutical companies, universities, research institutions and CROs with financial support from funding agencies.
Recently Global PDPs have been actively performing R&D on drugs, vaccines or diagnostics etc. with public and private funding. On this platform PDP often plays as a project manager of the virtual R&D team which consists of expertise from collaborating partners. This mechanism can offer better treatments to patients with diseases that fall outside the scope of market-driven R&D.
In 1999, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) brought together a team of international experts to study the crisis in drug R&D for neglected diseases. One of the reasons why MSF decided to create this Drugs for Neglected Diseases working group was that they found many patients suffering from tropical diseases and lack of efficient treatments because most of patients live in low-income countries. DNDi was officially established in 2003 as a global PDP with 7 founding partners and has put a great amount of effort to achieve R&D of inexpensive, efficacious, field-adapted treatments to address neglected patients' needs.
One of the greatest achievements is Fexinidazole, a treatment for African Human Trypanosomiasis, so-called sleeping sickness, which was found as a hit compound in DNDi's global screening on Nitroimidazoles and is about to be approved by EMA after a long way of development processes. Another achievement is the Neglected Tropical Diseases Drug Discovery Booster as a platform of screening and Hit to Lead process, through which millions of chemical compounds in partners' libraries can be tested in a speedy and cost- effective way.
