MMV 11th Call for proposals - H2L and LO for Malaria Drug Discovery


Many of the readers of the ChEMBL-og are interested in drug discovery against neglected and rare diseases. One of the great things for us in this field is the opening up of data in this field - there was the almost simultaneous release of primary HTS data from GSK, Novartis & St. Judes in 2011, more recently the results of a GSK HTS for TB. Having this data publicly available, for all, means that many smart people can analyse the data, and of course, pooling data in this way effectively is equivalent to running the assay against a far larger compound set, and allows more powerful cheminformatics analysis to identify chemical series, preliminary SAR, etc. Many of these datasets are available in our ChEMBL-NTD and ChEMBL-Malaria archives - and we know 2013 will be a great year for more data just like this! All these data are available for download, in the exact form as supplied by the depositor, no accounts/passwords, no lock-in to a software infrastructure, with no restrictions - just as it should be. Free the Data to set the World Free of Disease!

One of our partners, Medicine for Malaria Ventures (MMV) have recently announced an opportunity to get some real funding to take this data forward to real drugs. Further details of the call are here.

The call is for projects in the hit-to-lead (H2L) and lead optimization (LO) stages for new families of molecules specifically addressing the key priorities of the malaria eradication agenda: transmission blocking via the human host, and prevention of P. vivax relapse through killing of liver stage hypnozoites or reactivating them so as to be killed in the blood stages. In addition, proposals are sought for novel chemical series with a long half-life (ideally > 10 hours in rodents) and confirmed in vivo efficacy that could have potential for well tolerated P. falciparum chemoprophylaxis or asexual blood stage treatment in humans. Any proposals based on existing chemotypes must clearly address known issues.

 The deadline for applications is 12 noon CET March 15th,