Finding new collaboration models for enabling neglected tropical disease drug discovery.

Abstract

Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) have seen a welcome bolstering of activities focused on discovery of new therapies for these diseases. By and large, NTD drug discovery happens in the nonprofit sector—in academic laboratories and in public–private partnerships—though there has also been a significant and tangible influx of data and research contributions from the for-profit biopharmaceutical industry. Sets of screening data against the parasites that cause Chagas disease and African sleeping sickness have been released to the public via ChemBL (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/chemblntd), Collaborative Drug Discovery (http://www. collaborativedrug.com), and PubChem (https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov), and a fair quantity of these data have been produced by the pharmaceutical industry, many times in collaboration with groups in the nonprofit or academic environment. These initial public releases have begun to enable credible drug discovery for tropical diseases, particularly when taken together with new collaborative opportunities with industry that provide access to state-of-theart drug discovery and development capabilities. These facilities include the Tres Cantos Open Lab initiative [1], therapeutics development resources at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases [2], and compound screening sets now made available for testing against other pathogens, such as the Malaria Box [3]. Thus, perhaps there has never been a better time to be performing hit-to-lead and lead optimization drug discovery for NTDs.