Gates gives US$ 15.1 million for new drugs against African sleeping sickness and leishmaniasis

An international consortium of experts on drug development and delivery is to receive a US$ 15.1 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to work on new drugs against two tropical parasitic diseases, African sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis) and leishmaniasis. An estimated 300 000 to 500 000 Africans are infected with African sleeping sickness and about 60 million are at risk. Leishmaniasis is a disease that in its cutaneous form can be as disfiguring and disabling as leprosy and in its visceral form can be fatal if untreated. It infects an estimated 12 million people in 88 countries, and about 350 million people are at risk. Drugs exist for both diseases but are either not effective enough or are too expensive for wide use in the poor countries where these disease are prevalent or have serious side-effects. The international consortium comprises scientists from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the US, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the UK, the Swiss Tropical Institute, the Kenya Trypanosomiasis Research Institute, and Immtech International Inc., a US biopharmaceutical firm.