Therapeutics/Drugs

Innovators at Eco Med LLC have modified an injectable tuberculosis (TB) vaccine into convenient once-daily oral pill to be taken together with TB drugs. This simple, affordable approach will address the unmet need of the enormous TB burden in developing countries.

With bleeding and infection being the two largest causes of maternal mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa in childbirth, this project aims to distribute low-cost medication for women in rural Africa to take after delivery in the home setting, in hopes of saving many lives.

Preventing postpartum blood loss is a principle challenge to reducing maternal death in resource-scarce regions. Dr. Christian Kastrup's team at the University of British Columbia is developing an easy-to-use, low-cost technology toward this challenge. The technology uses self-propelling particles that rapidly travel through blood to clot blood and stop bleeding.

Counterfeit and substandard drugs are increasingly pervasive in developing nations. Current testing methods cannot identify compounds that are not normally present when the drug is produced, including harmful contaminants that can arise if the drug is improperly made or counterfeit. A stem cell-based drug testing platform will allow healthcare workers in developing communities to identify the source of counterfeit-drug induced illnesses at ultra-low cost with the same high standards used by pharmaceutical companies.

By engineering bacteria, this project aims to produce natural, low-cost drugs for the developing world.  The prototype objective: an antibiotic called violacein, which may help treat diseases such as leishmaniasis and malaria, but stalled in clinical development due to its high cost.

Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis and TB with HIV require long and costly treatment.  These innovators will modify an injectable TB vaccine into a convenient ,once-daily pill to be taken together with TB drugs -- a simple, affordable approach to help tackle the enormous TB burden in developing countries  As an adjunct to TB chemotherapy, this approach can dramatically reduce TB treatment duration.

Immunoxel, multiherbal immune supplement in honey lozenge, produces sputum clearance in over 85% TB patients in one month. Our immunotherapy is affordable and when used as an adjunct to TB chemotherapy can reduce treatment duration by at least 6-fold.

An estimated 9 million people are infected with multi drug-resistant TB; 1.4 million die per year. Successful completion of this University of Toronto-led project will lead to an innovative yeast-based bioprocess for the low-cost synthesis of antibiotic and lower the cost (now $5,000 per patient) of treating the disease in the developing world. "

Our idea is to discover new and more effective drugs for treating tuberculosis from fungal sources using an integrated proteomics approach for the determination of both the mechanism of drug action and resistance. We aim to discover new drugs which are also effective in the treatment of both latent and drug-resistant tuberculosis which constitute a major global health challenge. Follow Patrick Arthur on Twitter @PAKARErst"

This work focuses on Canada, India, and Uganda, and will lead to new therapeutic strategies that target the molecular chaperone Hsp90, the fungal Achilles' Heel, to save human lives.