News

February 6, 2019 Others

GHIT applauds Wellcome’s new commitment to the global fight against Leishmaniasis

Wellcome, global charitable foundation in UK and GHIT funding partner, recently announced a new multi-year £10 million investment in the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi) to develop new treatments for leishmaniasis. This partnership aims to develop new combinations of new, all-orally acting chemical entities through a joint strategy that leverages a cross-sector consortium of R&D partners, including Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited. While numerous donors support this overall program, GHIT is the only donor whose investment is fully dedicated to the development of a compound developed in partnership by DNDi with Takeda.

 

Specifically, DNDi, in collaboration with Takeda, aims to deliver an anti-parasitic aminopyrazole drug candidate that is orally active, safe, effective, short-course, and field-adapted for the treatment of visceral leishmaniasis (VL). This project began as a GHIT-supported lead optimization program in 2015, which concluded with the selection of the preclinical candidate DNDI-5561, meeting the target candidate profile for further preclinical development. DNDi and Takeda continue to work together to progress DNDI-5561 through regulatory preclinical studies and the single ascending dose stage of first-in-human study. Notably, aminopyrazoles are a previously unexplored chemical series for treatment of VL, drastically reducing the likelihood of any pre-existing drug resistance or cross-resistance with existing drugs.

 

Wellcome's new commitment to the consortium displays our mutual interest in combatting against leishmaniasis. Their additional contribution will help to leverage GHIT's investment further and to accelerate R&D for global health.

 

To learn more about these partnerships, please visit

- DNDi press release

- GHIT invested partnerships between DNDi & Takeda [G2014-208] [G2017-203]