Closing the Global Health Innovation Gap with Nanomedicines; Oral Treatments for Kinetoplastid Parasitic Diseases

Description of Activity

Major advances in biotechnology and drug delivery over the last 30 years have transformed medicine in the industrialised world, but these innovations have yet to reach developing countries. Each year more than 10 million people in the developing world die of infectious and parasitic diseases such as malaria, leishmaniasis, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and diarrheal diseases resulting in significant morbidity and mortality amongst people in their most productive years making economic development nearly impossible. Also, the burden of infectious and parasitic illness falls more heavily on children and pregnant women. Many of these infectious and parasitic diseases have earned the label of “neglected” because health-care markets in the afflicted countries are insufficient to attract pharmaceutical industry funding in research and development and involves African Trypanosoniasis, Chagas diseases, dengue, leishmaniasis, leprosy, lymphatic filariasis, malaria, onchocerciasis, schistosomiasis and tuberculosis. Over the past decade, public-private, not-for-profit, product development partnerships (PDPs) have arisen to tackle the development of new drugs, vaccines, diagnostics for developing-world diseases, while governments and foundations have increased their investment in neglected disease research and development. The challenge now is to augment these public and private sector efforts by providing to those partnerships access to advanced technologies and expertise for discovering, delivering and developing new medicines. Nanotechnology-enabled drug delivery systems offer a tool for expanding current drug markets as they can facilitate reformulation of classical drugs and failed leads to improve their efficacy (and thus duration of treatment), safety, bioavailability, circulation half-life, while also resulting in controlled release over short or long durations and highly specific site-targeted delivery of therapeutics.These properties of nano-enabled drug delivery systems (DDS) can overcome challenges encountered with current drugs or failed leads for kinetoplastid parasitic diseases (leishmaniasis, Chagas Disease) and case studies for developing oral nanomedicines for these diseases will be presented.

Period	23 Jun 2017
Held at	Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil
Degree of Recognition	International