gms | German Medical Science

MMV was founded in 1999 to fill the gap in the antimalarial drug pipeline. Since its foundation, MMV has registered four treatments and developed a rich portfolio of antimalarial drug candidates. From the beginning MMV focused on the provision of child friendly treatments, and ways of protecting children from the impact of malaria.

Malaria is an infectious disease, and there is always a danger of resistance. The long-term goal is the eradication of the disease and this will require new tools to treat, prevent transmission and new infections. Over the last 15 years a wide network of partnerships with industry and academia has been developed to find new chemical scaffolds capable of killing the parasite. Over six million compounds have been tested, and 25,000 active compounds have been identified, the majority of which are in the public domain.

Many of these chemical series have now been optimized and prepared for use in human studies. One of the key challenges is how to pick out the most exciting compounds as early as possible. Deliberately Induced Human infection studies are being progressively developed and deployed to study the effect of new drugs on blood stage infection, chemoprotection and gametocyte carriage. The volunteer studies give similar data in terms of the descriptors of compounds, without having to do studies in highly vulnerable African children. These data help us to design phase II studies, which are much more efficient: saving money, but also making development faster.

How we can we empower the scientific community to benefit from the massive screening campaigns of the last decade? From 25,000 hits, 400 key compounds was selected and made available to over 200 groups throughout the world: some working on malaria others working on related parasitic disease. Eight collaborations have been established with German researchers studying malaria. Continuing our work on open access drug discovery, we are establishing a second collection based on screening against all the WHO’s Neglected Tropical Disease parasites. This will be the Pathogen Box to be available in 2015.

MMV has pioneered new mechanisms for delivery and clinical development of new medicines against malaria. In parallel we are looking to see how much we can empower research in neglected disease as a whole by openly sharing our knowledge and information.