A major new centre to boost the development of drugs to tackle the foremost diseases of the developing world is to be created at the University of Dundee.
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African sleeping sickness is an infectious disease that is widespread south of the Sahara Desert. Although the around sixty million people residing in tropical Africa run the risk of becoming infected with the disease every day, only around four million of them are monitored for the disease by disease-control authorities.
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In a guest post on USAID's "IMPACT Blog," Rachel Cohen, regional executive director of DNDi North America, writes, "The United States government and its country partners should be commended for the tremendous achievements in the fight against neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) as part of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) NTD Program" and the National Institutes of Health.
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A group of diseases that kill millions of people each year can't be touched by antibiotics, and some treatment is so harsh the patient can't survive it. They're caused by parasites, and for decades researchers have searched for a "magic bullet" to kill them without harming the patient. Now, a team of microbiologists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has made an advance that could one day lead to a new weapon for fighting parasitic diseases such as African sleeping sickness, chagas disease and leishmaniasis.
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Clemson University researcher James Morris received a $360,079 competitive renewal grant from the National Institutes of Health to continue his study of Trypanosoma brucei, the single-celled parasite that causes African sleeping sickness.
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Researchers at the University of Dundee have identified fexinidazole as a possible, much-needed, new treatment for the parasitic disease visceral leishmaniasis.
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Developing World Health (DWH), a leading medical charity based in Stirlingshire, Scotland and committed to developing effective treatments for neglected tropical diseases, has signed a collaboration agreement with the internationally respected Consortium for Parasitic Drug Development (CPDD), based at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology has named Elisabetta Ullu, professor of internal medicine and cell biology at the Yale University School of Medicine, the winner of the society's inaugural Alice and C.C. Wang award.
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An antiparasitic agent used to treat African sleeping sickness might someday be used to prevent nonmelanoma skin cancers. Researchers found that DFMO, or α-difluoromethylornithine, still appeared to protect against nonmelanoma skin cancers years after people stopped taking the drug, according to a poster presented at the 10th AACR International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research, held Oct. 22-25, 2011.
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In this post in the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases' "End the Neglect" blog, Charles Ebikeme, a writer for the All Results Journals who has worked as a research scientist on African sleeping sickness, examines a "blurring" link between non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), writing, "The topsy-turvy nature of NTDs extends far beyond infectious diseases and is becoming increasingly more complicated."
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Rommie Amaro, UC Irvine assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences and computer science, has been selected by President Obama for the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists & Engineers.
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Charles Ebikeme, a writer who "has worked for many years as a research scientist on African sleeping sickness" examines a health revolution in information and communications technology (ICT) taking place across the developing world in this "End the Neglect" blog post, writing, "The initial concept of telemedicine now spans a wide spectrum of applications, labels, contexts, and platforms."
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Researchers from Scynexis Inc. of Research Triangle Park, N.C., and Anacor Pharmaceuticals in Palo Alto, Calif., sponsored by the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative, on Tuesday reported in the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases that a new experimental drug kills the parasite that causes African sleeping sickness in mice and will enter human clinical trials this year, ScienceNOW reports.
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The discovery of a potential new anti-malarial drug by a UT Southwestern Medical Center-led research team has been awarded Project of the Year by Medicines for Malaria Venture.
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Trypanosomatid parasites cause diseases like African sleeping sickness, Chagas' disease and leishmaniasis. Leishmaniasis affects about 12 million people worldwide, mostly in developing countries. Current drug treatments are inadequate due to drug toxicity and resistance.
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Anacor Pharmaceuticals announced today that it has entered into a development agreement with Medicines for Malaria Venture to develop Anacor's compound AN3661 for the treatment of malaria.
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Anacor Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:ANAC) and the Institute for OneWorld Health (iOWH) today announced the establishment of a joint research agreement to discover antibacterial compounds for treating shigellosis.
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Long considered a freewheeling loner, the Trypanosoma brucei parasite responsible for African sleeping sickness has revealed a totally unexpected social side, opening a potential chink in the behavioral armor of this and other supposedly solitary human parasites, according to research presented at the American Society for Cell Biology's 50th Annual Meeting in Philadelphia.
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Anacor Pharmaceuticals, the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Sandler Center and the Lindsley F. Kimball Research Institute (LFKRI) of the New York Blood Center (NYBC) today announced the establishment of a research and development collaboration to discover new drug therapies for the treatment of river blindness (onchocerciasis), a parasitic disease that is the second leading cause of infectious blindness worldwide, and is most prevalent in Africa.
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Trypanosomes are parasites responsible for many human and animal diseases, primarily in tropical climates. One disease these parasites cause, African sleeping sickness, results from the bite of infected tsetse flies, putting over 60 million Africans at risk in 36 sub-Saharan countries. The recent 1998-2001 sleeping sickness epidemics in South Sudan, Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda killed tens of thousands of people and resulted in over a half million infected individuals.
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