Web-based database to help tackle infectious diseases
18 Apr 07
A University of Melbourne researcher is part of an international team that launched an open access web tool this week to speed up the development of drugs against infectious diseases. Dr. Stuart Ralph, at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Bio21 Molecular Science and Biotechnology Institute, is using the sequenced genomes from the microbes that cause diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and sleeping sickness to identify targets that could be exploited by drugs.
These diseases disproportionately affect poor and marginalised people living in developing countries without the means to buy expensive medicines, so there has been less economic motivation for private enterprises to develop drugs to fight such infections. However, several pharmaceutical companies have recently become interested in helping to fight the scourge of these diseases through public-private partnerships. "We are trying to make it easier for private and public organisations to find weak points in the molecular makeup of these microbes that could be targeted by effective drugs", said Dr. Ralph
The open-access tool will organise different types of data about potential drug targets, as well as making it easy for scientists to share their data about which targets they think are promising. The complete genomes of many of disease-causing microbes have now been sequenced, so scientists now know have an enormous amount of data about these pathogens' genes, but this is yet to translate into the development of new drugs targeting these gene products. Looking through lists of thousands of genes for promising drug targets is a laborious and difficult process. The aim of the target-prioritisation web-tool is to simplify this task by gathering together all of the features of gene products that might make them promising or unsuitable as drug targets, and allowing users to rank targets based on these qualities. Scientists have conflicting ideas about what makes the best kind of drug targets, so the target-prioritisation web-tool lets users choose their favourite characteristics from a long list of possible data types and extract genes that match those descriptions. "In some ways looking for good drug targets in a genome is like panning through heaps of sand and gravel to find precious gold", said Dr Ralph, "and we are trying to make that process faster, easier and cheaper."
The collaborative effort was initiated and funded by the WHO's Special Program for Research and Training in Tropical diseases (TDR) in 2005, and consists of researchers in Australia, Argentina, Britain and the United States. "This is the first time that any group has assembled such a comprehensive set of information pertinent to drug target discovery, for such a diverse array of parasitic and bacterial diseases," said Dr. Wesley Van Voorhis from the University of Washington at Seattle, who coordinates the Drug Target Prioritization Network.
The microbes being studied include the causative agents of African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness), Dengue, Leishmaniasis, Malaria, Schistosomiasis, Tuberculosis, Chagas disease, Leprosy, Lymphatic filariasis, and Onchocerciasis (River Blindness). Each year these diseases cause several million deaths and make hundreds of millions of people sick, exacting a terrible human and economic toll.
The web-tool is accessible at http://tdrtargets.org/
Read the official WHO Media Release for more information.