Joint Research on New Treatment for Malaria That Afflict People in Developing Countries
Main targets
Creating innovation
In 2021, more than 247 million incidences of malaria were observed with 619,000 deaths. Malaria has led to serious social problems and innovative drugs to treat this disease is eagerly desperately needed.
Astellas is pursuing collaborative research to discover new drugs for the treatment of Malaria form the so-called "Big Three" infectious diseases that have ravaged developing world populations.
The research program below is funded by the Global Health Innovative Technology Fund (“GHIT Fund”). Program result is published on the GHIT Fund’s website.
Exploration of Antimalarial Drugs
Astellas conducted a collaborative research with Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV) for the exploration of an antimalarial drug from October, 2017. Initial profiling of the hit compounds discovered in the Screening Collaboration appear to have novel drug-like chemotypes and mechanism of action, different from current antimalarial drugs in use or compounds in the clinical pipeline, suggesting efficacy against all known field resistance. Astellas, MMV and TCGLS entered into a new collaborative research agreement on Feb 25, 2022 to identify lead compounds with acceptable pharmacological activity, pharmacokinetics, as well as safety from optimising multiple hit compounds obtained from the Screening Collaboration.