A pipeline of drugs for leishmaniasis and Chagas' disease.

Leishmaniasis and Chagas’ disease kill thousands of people each year, yet the drugs available to treat them are outdated, toxic, or failing in clinical trials. A team from GSK and the University of Dundee is now pushing a pipeline of new drug candidates through the final stages of preclinical development, aiming to deliver at least two—and ideally three—preclinical candidates within five years. Current therapies for visceral leishmaniasis (VL), cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL), and Chagas’ disease are not fit for purpose, and recent clinical trials have failed. The field has sparse drug pipelines and general agreement that combination treatments are needed. The GSK/Dundee team has built robust profiling platforms that allow rapid triaging of promising chemical series. They already have a preclinical candidate for VL, a further potential candidate, and have identified the molecular targets of two phenotypic series that showed efficacy in rodent models. If successful, this programme will produce a sustained pipeline of leads and preclinical candidates, including target-based approaches and combination therapies. That could replace the inadequate drugs currently used in some of the world’s poorest regions, where these parasitic diseases cause chronic illness, disability, and death.