Malaria The Main Focus Of New GHIT Fund Allocations
This article was originally published in PharmAsia News
Executive Summary
Japan's GHIT Fund is making new investments in a slew of pipeline projects for malaria, tuberculosis, leishmaniasis and dengue that involve local pharma industry and other academic partners.
TOKYO - The Japan-based public-private partnership focused on new treatments for tropical diseases, the Global Health Innovative Technology (GHIT) Fund, has unveiled a series of new investments totaling $10.7m in projects involving several major Japanese pharma firms and academic partners.
Some of the investments also include targeted funding from the Wellcome Foundation Ltd., a new GHIT partner.
GHIT says it has now invested around $43m over the past two years since it was launched in April 2013 with an initial commitment of around $100m. While good initial progress has been made, however, the fund and other neglected disease experts said in a meeting earlier this year that there is still much to do (Also see "GHIT Fund Progress Hailed But Much To Do" - Scrip, 9 Jun, 2015.).
A number of drug candidates initially identified through screening and put into the fund's Hit-to-Lead Platform have now been tagged to move through the next stage of development, and "We're also funding five new projects through our Product Development Platform and rolling out our inaugural investments in our Grand Challenge Platform," GHIT Fund CEO Dr. BT Slingsby said.
The new Grand Challenges initiative focuses on early-stage R&D for neglected infectious diseases and is being run along similar lines to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's program, set up a decade ago.
Under this GHIT plan, roughly $297,000 will be awarded to a partnership between Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. and the Swiss-based, non-profit public-private partnership Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV) and the University of Melbourne in Australia. The partners will develop assays to find ways to overcome drug resistance in the malarial parasite and work to identify inhibitors of proteasome activity within parasite cells.
While proteasome inhibitors area already well established in oncology, they may also be able to restore the effectiveness of mainstay antimalarial drug artemisinin and its derivatives. Resistance to these and artemisinin combination therapies is rising in Southeast Asia.
While the specific drug candidate in the project was not identified, Takeda is already marketing the proteasome inhibitor Velcade (bortezomib) for multiple myeloma and is developing another drug in the same class, ixazomib, initially for light-chain amyloidosis.
GHIT has also awarded a total of $3.5m to four other projects coming out of its Screening Platform, which has been trawling compound libraries at Japanese pharma firms for promising leads against tropical disease.
Malaria Projects
Eisai Co. Ltd. and MMV will explore for antimalarial activity several hits, including the optimization of Eisai inhibitors of glycosylphosphatidylinositol and novel molecules active against resistant strains and potentially also useful in disease relapse and parasite transmission.
Around $208,000 has been allocated to a new joint development program between Eisai and the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) and the University of Liverpool in the UK to support preclinical work on a drug candidate for malaria, E209.
Eisai said the molecule - discovered by the university and LSTM - is a rapid-acting tetraoxane against all types of malarial parasite and therefore may be effective in artemisinin-resistant strains.
Eisai is already working with the LSTM on drugs against the Wolbachia bacteria, which are necessary for the growth of parasitic filariae worms that cause lymphatic filariasis and onchocerciasis (river blindness).
$1.9m is being provided to an ongoing malaria project between MMV and Takeda for a malaria drug, DSM265, which is now in Phase II trials in Peru. Used in combination with existing therapies, GHIT sees this as having the potential to be a single-dose cure and/or a prophylactic treatment.
Other newly funded projects include between Daiichi Sankyo Co. Ltd. and the TB Alliance, which will explore 148 drug-like molecules from the Japanese firm's library, with the work to be undertaken at Daiichi Sankyo's research center in India. GHIT will invest around $908,000 in the partnership.
Vaccines Allocations
Other funding has been agreed for work on potential vaccines for leishmaniasis, dengue and TB involving universities in Japan and the US, while Shionogi & Co. Ltd. and the Japan Anti-Tuberculosis Association and the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development will explore promising hits from Shionogi's library.
The preclinical development of a quadravalent dengue candidate vaccine involving the European Vaccine Initiative Nagasaki University and Institut Pasteur is ongoing.
The GHIT Fund consortium includes six Japanese pharma companies, the Japanese government and the Gates Foundation, and taps innovative Japanese R&D in academia, the pharma industry and public sector.