R & D

Bayer HealthCare and sanofi-aventis provided financial support for development of new therapies for sleeping sickness (Human African Trypanosomiasis or HAT) through the UNDP-World Bank-WHO Special Program for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases (TDR). R&D projects supported include an oral form of eflornithine, manufactured by sanofi-aventis, and a combination of eflornithine and nifurtimox - the active ingredient of Lampit, originally used to treat Chagas disease.

In September 2009, the Wellcome Trust and Merck & Co., Inc. announced the creation of the MSD Welcome Trust Hilleman Laboratories, a research and development joint venture with a not-for-profit mission to focus on developing affordable vaccines to prevent diseases that commonly affect low-income countries. The joint venture is the first in which a research charity and a pharmaceutical company have jointly created a separate entity with equally shared funding and decision-making rights.

There is a great need for new medicines for treating tropical disease. Even today, tropical parasitic diseases such as malaria, leishmaniasis, African sleeping sickness (HAT) or Chagas disease still represent a major health threat for much of the world's population. They lead to millions of deaths per year and massive socio-economic effects in many countries. New medicines should be focused on the needs of target patients, and be suitable for use in the field. They need to be cost-effective, orally bio-available and stable under extreme conditions of heat and humidity.

In June 2009, Merck & Co., Inc. and the not-for-profit product development partnership Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi) announced a master agreement to support discovery and development of improved treatments for a wide range of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). The agreement covers a wide range of NTDs including visceral leishmaniasis and Chagas disease that infect millions of people. As with many other NTDs, adequate treatments suitable for poor populations are lacking.