Abstract
Today, the World Health Organization recognizes 17 major parasitic and related infections as the neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). Despite recent gains in the understanding of the nature and prevalence of NTDs, as well as successes in recent scaled-up preventive chemotherapy strategies and other health interventions, the NTDs continue to rank among the world’s greatest global health problems. For virtually all of the NTDs (including those slated for elimination under the auspices of a 2012 London Declaration for NTDs and a 2013 World Health Assembly resolution [WHA 66.12]), additional control mechanisms and tools are needed, including new NTD drugs, vaccines, diagnostics, and vector control agents and strategies. Elimination will not be possible without these new tools. Here we summarize some of the key challenges in translational science to develop and introduce these new technologies in order to ensure success in global NTD elimination efforts.
Highlights
The modern framework for considering a group of parasitic and related infections as neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) was put forward by the World Health Organization (WHO) together with a series of key policy papers published by a community of scientists in the early years following the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) [1,2,3,4,5]
Because many of these NTDs either mostly or exclusively affect people living in poverty, they are being developed primarily by nonprofit product development partnerships focused on specific NTD drugs (e.g., Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative [DNDi] and PATH), diagnostics (e.g., Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics [FIND] and PATH), vaccines
Additional new research that aims to improve on existing control tools— including olfaction technologies to alter mosquito behavior or enhanced targets and traps used for tsetse control [81,82]—will be highly beneficial
Summary
Citation: Hotez PJ, Pecoul B, Rijal S, Boehme C, Aksoy S, Malecela M, et al (2016) Eliminating the Neglected Tropical Diseases: Translational Science and New Technologies. PLoS Negl Trop Dis 10(3): e0003895. doi:10.1371/journal.pntd.0003895 Funding: The Article Processing Charges for this paper were funded by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which also provided funding for a commissioning fee of US$2,000. The authors donated their US$2,000 commissioning fee to the END Fund, which funds mass drug administration for NTDs (see www.end.org). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: We have read the journal's policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests: Peter J. Hotez is principal investigator and patent holder on vaccines against hookworm and schistosomiasis, as well as principal investigator on several other vaccines in development against Neglected Tropical Diseases.
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