The Global Alliance for TB Drug Development (TB Alliance) and Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases (NITD) announced their plans to pursue a joint research program into novel, promising anti-tuberculosis agents. The research will focus on identifying more lead compounds in the nitroimidazopyran class for the treatment of tuberculosis (TB).
The TB Alliance will collaborate with the NITD in Singapore to identify a next generation of nitroimidazopyran compounds related to PA-824 for further development to improve TB therapy. PA-824 is one of the lead compounds of the TB Alliance portfolio and is on track to enter Phase I trials in 2005. The successful preclinical development of PA-824 has demonstrated the potential of this class of compounds and prompted additional investigations into this family of drugs for tuberculosis.
"The partnership between Novartis and the TB Alliance opens up global, cross-disciplinary avenues to test the full potential of this exciting novel class of compounds," said Maria C. Freire, President and CEO of the TB Alliance. "It combines the know-how of the pharmaceutical industry and the agility of the TB Alliance to accelerate the development of better and affordable treatments and bring them to registration."
Since its launch in 2003, the NITD pledged to partner with the TB Alliance and committed that the Novartis Group intends to make the resulting treatments readily available to poor patients without profit in those developing countries where the disease is endemic. This commitment falls directly in line with the TB Alliance's principle of "affordability, adoption and access."
"Novartis elected to contribute discovery science to the search for new, fast-acting and affordable TB drugs. This undertaking is the tangible proof of our commitment and demonstrates the vision inherent to the NITD," said Dr. Paul Herrling, Head of Corporate Research at Novartis and Chairman of the Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases.