Hi everyone and welcome back to MedChemNet. In this video
we speak to Joseph Hargan-Calvopiña, Program Manager at BIO Ventures for Global Health
to find out more about drug development for neglected tropical diseases.
Hi, my name is Joseph Hargan, and I am a program manager at BIO Ventures for Global Health or BVGH
and we're located in Seattle, Washington.
BVGH is a nonprofit organization that works at the crossroads of the private and public sectors to advance research and improve health
We were established in 2004 by the Biotechnology Innovation Organization or BIO,
which is the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry trade association.
We did this to engage the industry in global health initiatives.
BVGH connects with people,
resources and ideas across pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, governments and nonprofits to solve global health issues
Well, BVGH's programs fall under three main categories,
one of them is to expand access to cancer medicines and technologies in Africa,
the next one is to build biomedical R&D capacity in low and middle income countries and
finally one of our major focuses is to accelerate drug discovery and other product R&D for diseases of poverty.
Well, diseases of poverty are health conditions that are more prevalent in the world's poorest populations,
when compared to some of the wealthier populations in the world.
They're not restricted to the developing world,
they're actually disproportionately affect the populations and impact the populations that live in low and middle-income countries.
A lot of these diseases are caused by infectious agents such as viruses, bacteria and parasites, and it's these infectious or
communicable diseases that BVGH particularly focuses on.
There is a whole host of diseases of poverty that the World Health Organization calls neglected tropical diseases, or
NTDs for short. So NTDs collectively affect more than 1 billion people in tropical and subtropical environments
in nearly 150 countries, and they cost developing economies billions of dollars annually.
Well, that's a complicated question for a complicated problem,
diseases of poverty are a complex problem that require the coordinated efforts of a variety of stakeholders,
both in country and internationally, to eliminate and eradicate these diseases.
Pharmaceutical companies play a key role in these efforts through some of the donation programs that they have going on. R&D is also needed
to improve our arsenal of tools to prevent, diagnose and treat these diseases of poverty,
and although the specific needs of
R&D and the priorities can vary by the disease and the region, one of the big emphases is
developing better drugs.
Developing a better drug can mean many different things
depending on the disease,
but an example of a better drug would mean one with fewer toxic side effects, or maybe a drug that
is more effective than the current therapies because they kill the infectious agents throughout all the life stages of the lifecycle.
For example a drug that can kill pathogens that have developed the resistance to the current medication or even drugs that can be administered
orally or for shorter periods of time that allow for more patient compliance.
So some of these, and sometimes a combination of all of these, are very important.
An example of this is in 2016 Johnson & Johnson received the FDA approval for a chewable formulation of
Mendezole to treat young children with intestinal worms,
and this was important because some of these small children couldn't swallow the the solid tablet that was available at the time.
Well in order to accelerate drug discovery and
really find a way to address these diseases of poverty, BVGH and its partners established the WIPO Re:Search initiative in 2011.
So this was done to address the significant need for improved drugs diagnostics and vaccines for diseases of poverty.
WIPO Re:Search is a global private and public partnership that focuses on accelerating R&D for malaria, tuberculosis
and some of the NTDs that I mentioned earlier,
and one of the goals is to ensure the
accessibility of the resulting products within the populations that need them, so making these resulting products
accessible to people from low and middle income countries.
One of the methods that we are doing this through is through the free sharing of intellectual property or IP assets,
such as compounds data,
clinical samples, technology and expertise.
WIPO Re:Search partners include the World Intellectual Property Organization or WIPO, 8 multinational pharmaceutical
companies and
125 nonprofit and government
organizations across 40 countries and six continents.
Well, we're very thrilled with what WIPO research has accomplished so far and in its first six years to date
we have established about
125 R&D collaborations,
nearly two-thirds are focused on drug discovery, over half of them involve the private industry
36 of these projects are currently active and a nine of them have met key development milestones, which is really important.
Many of our promising drug discovery projects involve the repurposing of
pharmaceutical company compounds in order to make the drug discovery process more efficient and to cut costs.
So one example of this process is Merck & Co. is partnering with the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research,
in Australia, to develop aspartyl proteases as anti malarial drugs.
Also research from the University of California San Diego is repurposing polo-like kinase
inhibitor compounds from Takeda for schistosomiasis drug discovery. In another promising collaboration Pfizer shared its
investigators brochure to a drug called Modipafant with a small company called 60 Degrees Pharmaceuticals,
which used the data to design a clinical trial to test the efficacy of the drug against dengue.
The value in this is that accessing the data from Pfizer allowed 60 degrees to save both time and money
in drug development efforts.
Researching companies interested in learning more about
advancing neglected disease drug discovery, or other types of research that involve
diagnostics, vaccines and the NTD field
through WIPO Re:Search, they can email me at j.hargan@bvgh.org or visit the BVGH website at
www.BVGH.org
If you liked this video, be sure to check out other great content on MedChemNet,
and thanks to Joseph for speaking with us today.
Be sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn @MedChemNet.
Thanks for watching!
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