NTDs

About 18 million people have river blindness worldwide, according to the World Health Organization, but more than 99% of cases of this disease are found in Africa. It goes by the technical name "onchocerciasis," and it spreads through small black flies that breed in fast-flowing, highly oxygenated waters. When an infected fly bites a person, it drops worm larvae in the skin, which can then grow and reproduce in the body.
There is no vaccine for river blindness, but there is a drug, called ivermectin that paralyzes and kills the offspring of adult worms, according to the Mayo Clinic. It may also slow the reproduction of adult female worms, so there are fewer of them in the skin, blood and eyes. The pharmaceutical company Merck has been donating the treatment, under the brand name Mectizan, since 1985.

Twenty-five years ago last month, something big started, a collaborative venture that changed the lives of hundreds of millions of people. In October 1987, Roy Vagelos, then the chief executive of Merck, launched the largest pharmaco-philanthropic venture ever. He approached me, as the head of the Task Force for Child Survival in Atlanta, and offered the drug — now copyrighted as Mectizan — for free if the task force could devise a distribution system.
The original target of treating 6 million people in six years was achieved in four years. Only 15 years after the program started, 250 million treatments had been given. Last year, the Mectizan Donation Program provided 140 million treatments for onchocerciasis in Africa, Latin America and Yemen. A ­quarter-century after the program began, 1 billion treatments have been provided free by ­Merck.

The Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi) and Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV) announce today the identification of three chemical series targeting the treatment of deadly neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), through DNDi's screening of MMV's open access Malaria Box. The resulting DNDi screening data are among the first data generated on the Malaria Box to be released into the public domain, exemplifying the potential of openly sharing drug development data for neglected patients.