Merck partners with Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative

Merck is opening its compound library to DNDi to help find cures for leishmaniasis and Chagas disease.

Through the collaboration with DNDi, Merck is working with a network of leading, internationally recognized experts in this area. In addition, Merck is supporting local R&D capacity-building via DNDi’s network of centers of expertise in R&D for NTDs in the Global North and Global South.

“It is critical that, all together, we take an end-to-end approach to addressing Neglected Tropical Diseases that are affecting more than a billion people worldwide. We need better, newer tools and solutions for many of these diseases. Through our partnership with DNDi, we want to help to speed up the materialization of a pipeline of drugs to fight them,” stated Belén Garijo, Member of the Executive Board of Merck and CEO Healthcare.

A collaboration with five other pharmaceutical companies (Eisai, Shionogi, Takeda, AstraZeneca and Celgene), the DNDi NTD Booster experiments with a new open innovation approach to drug discovery through a multilateral, simultaneous search process across the member companies. Through an iterative search process, companies continually examine their libraries for better matches as the search is refined, condensing the time it takes to find treatment leads.

“Early-stage drug discovery is expensive and time consuming. The Booster overcomes these difficulties by allowing DNDi to conduct multilateral, simultaneous search processes across the millions of compounds owned by the participating companies,” said Dr Bernard Pécoul, DNDi Executive Director. “Adding Merck’s compound collection to the Booster project increases the chance of discovering desperately needed new treatments for leishmaniasis and Chagas disease.”

By joining DNDi, Merck is also reinforcing its commitment to the London Declaration, an unprecedented public-private multi-stakeholder partnership to catalyse momentum in reaching World Health Organization (WHO) 2020 NTD goals to control, eliminate or eradicate 10 NTDs, including leishmaniasis and Chagas disease. When the partnership was launched in 2012, Merck pledged up to a tenfold increase in its praziquantel donation to fight schistosomiasis, the worm disease, until its elimination. Between 2012 and 2016, Merck increased its donation from 25 million to 200 million tablets. At least 218 million people needed treatment in 2015, with 90% residing in Africa.

The Merck-DNDi NTD Booster Consortium collaboration is a strategic part of Merck’s Access to Health (A2H) approach to improve sustainable access to high-quality health solutions for underserved populations in low and middle income countries, through its “4As of Access” priorities of Availability, Affordability, Awareness and Accessibility. Sharing proprietary knowledge with leading NTD partners in areas where Merck has no specific expertise but have relevant compounds helps ensure that science advances and new generations of health solutions to address the needs of the poorest are discovered.