E-DRUG: NYT: New Drug Mix Against Malaria Is Announced
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[Thanks to "Jaya Banerji" <jbanerji@dndi.org>
Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative]
December 13, 2005
New Drug Mix Against Malaria Is Announced
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/13/international/13malaria.html
[copied as fair use]
Two simpler, cheaper formulations of anti-malaria drugs will be available next year, a public-private partnership announced yesterday.
The cost will be about half of what the current pills cost and the new pills will mix large doses of two drugs into one pill, so adults will take only six pills over three days instead of the current 24 to 32, said Dr. Bernard Pécoul, executive director of the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative.
They will also be made in low-dose pills that can be dissolved in water for infants.
There about 500 million cases of malaria worldwide, and the disease kills more than a million people each year, many of them young children.
The new drugs will combine forms of artemisinin, a relatively new malaria drug developed in China from the sweet wormwood plant, with one of two established drugs, amodiaquine and mefloquine, which act more slowly but linger in the blood.
The same drugs are available now as separate pills packaged together in plastic blister packs, Dr. Pécoul explained. But patients in many poor countries have discovered that the artemisinin-based pills taste better and lower fevers faster, so they take only the ones they like. That encourages the growth of drug-resistant strains of malaria, he said.
Combining them into one pill required a pharmacological breakthrough, he explained. The older drugs tended to release water, which broke down the artemisinin.
Solving that problem and testing the new pills required several million dollars, which was provided by the European Union, the Swiss government, Doctors Without Borders, and in-kind contributions by some pharmaceutical companies, he said.
Sanofi-Aventis, the world's third-largest pharmaceutical company, has agreed to produce the amodiaquine-artemisinin combination and Far-Manguinhos, Brazil's state pharmaceutical laboratory, will make the mefloquine one.
The Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative was founded by Doctors Without Borders, the Pasteur Institute of France, the World Health Organization and research institutes in Brazil, India, Malaysia and Kenya.