Drug Discovery Unit Dundee and Novartis join forces to discover new drugs for malaria and future viral pandemics

The Drug Discovery Unit (DDU) initiated collaboration this summer on two projects with the Biomedical Research division of Novartis and is extremely proud of this joint effort to drive forward new candidate drugs for malaria and pandemic preparedness.

The DDU already has a track record in delivering anti-malarial compounds to the clinic: Cabamaquine was licensed from the DDU to MMV and is now in Phase II trials in Africa with Merck KGaA. Despite considerable progress made in the last 20 years, reduction in malaria cases has stalled and resistance to current treatments is rising. Malaria is still a major global health concern with approximately 249 million malaria cases and 608,000 deaths in 2022. A next generation of antimalarial treatments is required to combat resistance and prevent infections. The new target-based project with Novartis aims to deliver an antimalarial with a novel mechanism of action ready to progress to more advanced toxicological studies. The goal will be to deliver a safer treatment that prevents “relapse” by targeting dormant parasites in the liver (hypnozoites) that are not sensitive to most currently available antimalarials. Importantly, the collaboration will allow the teams to investigate the potential of the novel mechanism as a treatment for two different malarial species. The DDU project is currently funded by the UKRI Medical Research Council (MRC) DPFS scheme and is led by Prof Ian Gilbert, Dr Beatriz Baragaña and Dr Kate McGonagle.

“The shared purpose of Novartis and our DDU team to advance this antimalarial project place us in the best position to deliver a safe new treatment with efficacy against both resistant and relapsing parasites.” said Dr Beatriz Baragaña, Malaria Portfolio Lead, Drug Discovery Unit, University of Dundee

Dr Kate McGonagle, Medicinal Chemistry Team Leader, Drug Discovery Unit, University of Dundee added, “Novartis has an impressive track record in malaria drug discovery, having made vital contributions to the field. The expertise and added resources they will contribute to the DDU antimalarial programme will accelerate our efforts towards identifying new medicines. We are thrilled to have the opportunity to work with them.”

The second collaboration with Novartis builds on a target-based project which began at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 but now focuses importantly on developing a broad-spectrum anti-viral compound for pandemic preparedness. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic, is one of a family of coronaviruses of which seven are already known to infect humans. The DDU work led by Prof Ian Gilbert and Dr Duncan Scott is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and is part of IMI Corona Accelerated R&D in Europe (CARE) consortium. The target based drug discovery programme, although originally designed to SARS-CoV-2 specifically, shows promising pan-coronavirus activity and low mutation risk and, therefore, lower chance of treatment resistance. The project will take the lead chemical series and, similarly to the malaria collaboration, advance compound development into advanced toxicology studies and complex viral efficacy models. Novartis is part of the NIH-funded AViDD centers, a program dedicated to accelerating antiviral treatments to be ready for future pandemics, and will support the project by providing virology and toxicology expertise.

Dr Duncan Scott, Coronavirus Portfolio Lead, DDU University of Dundee said, “We are very excited at the Dundee Drug Discovery Unit to be collaborating with Novartis, a world-leading pharmaceutical company, to push the frontier of coronavirus drug research and develop medicines for any future coronavirus pandemics.”