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.
There is an urgent need for new drugs to treat infectious diseases of the developing world, such as tuberculosis (TB), malaria and African sleeping sickness. However, despite significant efforts in early stage drug discovery, there is a bottleneck when it comes to the lead optimisation stage of molecules targeting these diseases.
Lead optimisation is a key stage in the drug discovery process, where early leads are improved through cycles of design, synthesis and testing to identify potential drugs which are suitable for testing in a clinical setting. It is a labour intensive process requiring significant laboratory resource over a number of years.
To address this need Professor Paul Wyatt and colleagues at the Drug Discovery Unit (DDU) at the University of Dundee, with joint funding from the Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, are establishing "A Centre of Excellence for Lead Optimisation for Diseases of the Developing World". The Dundee centre represents a -6.5million investment over five years and will create 11 new posts.
Professor Wyatt said, "One of the main aims of the Drug Discovery Unit is to make inroads into developing drugs for diseases that affected the developing world. We have the capability through the DDU to help break the bottleneck which occurs at a key stage of the drug discovery process."