£10m boost for tropical diseases research at Scots university

RESEARCHERS at a Scottish university have received funding of more than £10 million to investigate tropical diseases which kill 150,000 people every year.

The University of Dundee has received a grant from the Wellcome Trust and pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) to research some of the world’s neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), including Chagas disease and African sleeping sickness.

The Drug Discovery Unit at the university will work in partnership with GSK’s Tres Cantos Medicines Development campus in Spain to develop safe and affordable treatments for NTDs that are caused, in some cases, by parasites.

The aim of the collaboration is to find a treatment against one of the diseases in the next five years.

The university’s Professor Alan Fairlamb said: “These parasitic diseases, which afflict millions of people worldwide, are collectively responsible for about 150,000 deaths every year in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

“The drugs currently used to treat patients are often difficult to administer, have toxic side-effects and are not always effective due to drug resistance.

“Better, safer drugs are needed that are cheap and easy to administer, because most of these patients are living in poverty without access to hospitals or clinics.”

Chagas disease is a tropical parasitic disease, commonly transmitted by insects or through blood transfusion.

In serious cases, patients can develop life-threatening heart and digestive system problems, and many of the current treatments cause side-effects.

African sleeping sickness is commonly found in west and central Africa and causes a chronic infection.

The World Health Organisation says a person can be infected for months or even years without major signs of the disease, but when symptoms emerge the patient is often already in an advanced stage where the central nervous system is affected.