As part of recent efforts to expand cooperation in health, the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) is interested in learning more about the spectrum of biomedical research and expertise in the Russian Federation. In particular, efforts focusing on detection of drug resistant tuberculosis and discovery / development of new drugs to treat tuberculosis are among the highest research priorities.
Steven Smith, Director of the NIH/NIAID Office of Global Research, Dr Barbara Laughton (NIH/NIAID) and Gail Cassell (Eli Lilly) visited the ISTC offices in Moscow on Tuesday, 17 November 2009. The goal of the meeting was to present the respective programs and to better understand the science underway for new antibiotic development by meeting with several renowned investigators in Moscow during their visit at ISTC. As a part of the meeting Quantum delivered a presentation concerning our anti-tuberculosis drug candidate.
NIH distributes $170M in grants among non-US research organizations every year. Most of the money come to the US collaborators, though there are grants available to non-US residents as well (though fewer in numbers). NIAID leads the anti-tuberculosis effort and is involved in a great number of collaborative projects. The latest project is performed together with Bill&Melinda Gates foundation and resulted in creation of a comprehensive online TB research database http://tbdb.org. NIAID funds screening of compound libraries (the statistics shows roughly 1% hit rate, AID 1949: 101k compounds tested, 1594active; AID 1626: 215k compounds tested, 2044compounds found active).
Eli Lilly has also presented its non-profit anti-TB initiative. Gail Cassell of EL highlighted a scary situation with XDR TB, originally identified in 2006 and by now comprising up to 30-50% cases in some regions of South Africa and India. 30% HIV-positive patients with XDR TB are dead within a few months. The world’s R&D spendings against TB are around $150M/year. With new drugs costs approaching 1B, the current budget hardly allows for getting a single new drug in 5-10years. This is in spite of the fact that XDR TB treatment would require a cocktail of a few novel and highly efficient drugs.
QUANTUM drug discovery platform is developed with the idea of bringing down the drug discovery costs and may well be the lacking tool to bring up the long awaited, cheap and effective medications against TB
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