In one of the first drug development deals between a drug maker and a nonprofit organization, the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development will announce Friday that it has licensed a tuberculosis-fighting compound from Chiron Corp.
The deal is the first for the Global Alliance, which is backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates and the Rockefeller foundations and is striving to find a more effective treatment for tuberculosis and make it accessible to economically developing countries.
The disease is one of the world's most serious epidemics and the biggest cause of death in people with AIDS, killing two million each year.
Like other groups such as the Medicines for Malaria Venture and the Global AIDS Vaccine Initiative, the Global Alliance aims to finance and license a number of compounds from drug makers and to contract other companies to help take the drug candidates through clinical trials and the approval process.
Chiron will receive an undisclosed amount upfront from the Global Alliance and milestone payments if the drug makes progress in trials. The nonprofit organization, in turn, gets full rights to the compound. Chiron, of Emeryville, Calif., said it has agreed not to take any royalties on the potential drug's sales in developing countries.
Though it hasn't proceeded beyond the laboratory, the compound, called PA-824, has shown to be effective in fighting drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis in in-vitro tests. Researchers also believe PA-824 may be powerful enough to shorten the average tuberculosis treatment time of six to nine months, which doctors say is critical to getting more people to complete the therapy.
Still, the vast majority of all drugs fail in clinical trials. The Global Alliance says it is in talks with drug makers and research laboratories to secure rights to at least four other compounds over the next year.
Should any of those drugs pass the lengthy and difficult development stage in which most fail, the group plans to leverage its investment by controlling the price in poor countries. But it could allow a co-developing company to sell the same drug at a different price in richer countries, said Maria Freire, chief executive of the Global Alliance.