Toronto, ON --Almost $2 million is being invested by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help fight major parasitic diseases of the developing world.
The Structure-guided Drug Discovery Coalition (SDDC), an international collaboration of academic and industrial scientists coordinated by the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) at the University of Toronto (U of T), has been developing new medicines for tuberculosis and malaria on an existing Gates Foundation grant. It works using a highly collaborative model with over nine institutions actively working towards a common goal, and receiving up-to-date advice from the world's best experts in those diseases. With this new funding, the SDDC expands its drug discovery mandate to include filarial diseases such as river-blindness and elephantiasis, which are caused by parasitic worms as well as cryptosporidiosis, which is the second-leading cause of infant diarrhea and estimated to be responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths every year.
"The SDDC team has shown tremendous progress in the TB and malaria projects," said Chris Walpole, who directs the SDDC from the SGC and is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the U of T. "We are looking forward to making a similar impact toward discovering drugs for filarial diseases and cryptosporidiosis."
Ray Hui, Principal Investigator at the SGC and an Affiliate Scientist at the Toronto General Research Institute said: ""Research on these neglected diseases lags significantly behind other infectious diseases. By applying the SDDC's structure-guided drug discovery platform as well as repurposing the Coalition's assets in malaria and TB, there is an opportunity to fast-track the discovery of new medicines for these filarial diseases and cryptosporidiosis, which afflict over a billion people worldwide."
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For more information, please contact:
Liam Mitchell
Associate Director, Communications
Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto
Tel: 416-978-4672
Email: liam.mitchell@utoronto.ca
About the SDDC
The Structure-guided Drug Discovery Coalition is an international collaboration directed by Dr. Chris Walpole at the Structural Genomics Consortium and an Adjunct Professor in U of T's Department of Chemistry. It includes the NIAID supported Center for Structural Genomics of Infectious Diseases and Seattle Structural Genomics Center for Infectious Disease, researchers at Argonne National Labs, Beryllium, the University of Chicago, the University of Dundee, University of Frankfurt, ICGEB New Delhi, the University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Seattle Biomedical Research Institute, Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, Texas A&M University, University of Toronto and the University of Washington. The new initiative will add collaborators at the Northeastern University, University of California, San Diego, University of Liverpool (UK), and the University of Vermont.
About the SGC
The SGC accelerates research in new areas of human biology and drug discovery by making all its research output available to the scientific community with no strings attached, and by creating an open collaborative network of scientists in hundreds of universities around the world and in nine global pharmaceutical companies. SGC is funded by Abbvie, Bayer, Boehringer Ingelheim, Canada Foundation for Innovation, Eli Lilly Canada, Genome Canada, GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen, Novartis, Ontario Ministry of Research & Innovation, Pfizer, Takeda, and the Wellcome Trust.